My friends say I am being really pessimistic but with this many issues running wild in the game is almost beyond patching, we are gonna need them to rework many fundamental parts of this game.
My biggest fear is that this will have to get fixed by the modding community because 2k either cant or wont do it, and if they can then it wont come in a patch but in a "pay to fix your game" expansion pack.
Does ANYBODY have any idea about if and when this will get adressed or even acknowledged?
i have no idea. but i do know that i'm not playing again till they fix all the main multiplayer issues.
I expect them to fix the stability issues as much as they can. And I expect them to make mods in MP possible. However I don't expect all of the feature we want as MPers to happen. But with decent stable MP with mods I have no problem designing mods to do what Firaxis does not have the time and resources to add to the game. Fortunately they did build a very powerful modding system for this reason.
CS
What I think that you miss is that this is a Civ:Revolutions II and we as PC players are the beta testers. Ive seen it happen in a long line of games for the last 7 or 8 years. This is the most recent.Originally Posted by CanuckSoldier
I think we'll get fixes for;
a) A proper save system.
b) Combat animations
c) Turns not progressing or crash related issues.
I don't think we'll get anything more without an expansion.
I want to think that they are working on so many things, but the list of problems with this game are so extensive, It seems like they'd be writing a whole new game.
I still simply can not believe this has been released in this state
All I can do is speak from experience... Civilization Revolution had completely broken multiplayer on the PS3, you literally could not access a game at all. It took 2K Ellizabeth about a month and 1,000 threads to make a comment on it, which was basically a "blame Gamespy" response.
In the end, a patch was released, albeit a good three months later. So don't hold your breath, guys.
I really don't think this applies. Civ: Revolution is a dumbed-down console money-grab for casual gamers. Civilization 5 is Firaxis's FLAGSHIP game. They ought to know their reputation depends on Civ 5's legacy, and for that reason I expect all the MAIN problems to be resolved with a few good patches. If I have to wait 3 months, I won't exactly be elated - but I'll wait 3 months and then enjoy the hell of out Civilization 5 online.
They have repeatedly assured us that Civ 5's multiplayer is run by Steamworks, NOT Gamespy. If this turns out to be a lie, I'll be seeking a refund.
Last edited by Beliathon; 10-03-2010 at 10:20 PM.
My experience has been that multiplayer works just fairly well in CIV V. My friends and I have been playing CIV V multiplayer since the first week it came out although the first three or four days involved a little learning of how to use multiplayer effectively and we seemed to think that Steam was having some issues which seemed to resolve themselves by the 3rd or 4th day of the first week after release.
My friends and I now regularily play CIV V with anywhere from 3 - 8 players and generally it works well. There can be a little lag on occasion (not sure if this is a Steam issue or a game issue); but it is far from off putting. The major issue we have had is figuring out how to load a saved multiplayer game as the game only seems to want to look for this in the autosave directory; but this can be worked around.
Initially, we had a problem in setting up a multiplayer game where other players kept bouncing in and out of the game room. Now, we set up all our games as "Private" games and use Steam to direct everyone into the game by using Steam's "friends list." Once you understand this, setting up a game with known friends is easy and trouble free (works every time for us).
Once the load saved multiplayer games issue is resolved; the basics for multiplayer gaming would seem to be working ok.
Just thought I would post my experience so that others knew that it was possible to play CIV V multiplayer and it is one heck of a good time.
Its been weeks and its just as broken as day 1.
This is exactly how i feel. Its like there is just too much to patch...
I am not really worried about the game getting fixed. The issue is more WHEN than IF. Judging by the responses on the forums, crash issues are top priority and everything else is taking a back seat. This is understandable, since being able to play the game, albeit a broken one, should be the first priority.
Bingo, took the words out of my mouth. Speak with ya money.
Last edited by Djsalt; 10-06-2010 at 12:55 AM.
I don't know why people want combat animations.. it should be the last thing to get, fix the game first, then concentrate on bs like that.
While I agree fixing the bugs should be first. The missing animations aren't "bs". I mean they are already in single player, cant we just turn them on or be able to toggle them for multiplayer. Doesn't seem that hard.
Yes multiplayer "works" but it is extremly flawed, My car "works" but that doesn't mean it has AC, a sound system, or anything else that makes me want to spend time in it.
Yes you can (and I do) play Civ 5 with your friends but it is nowhere near the level of quality as Civ 4 was, and is. People don't want to spend money on a sequal only to find out that it's a dumbed down version of the original with fancy new graphics (which do look great by the way)
As far as I'm concerned i would have ALMOST been satisfied with getting Civ 4 multiplayer a new paintjob so to speak, but this doesn't even meet those minimal standards in my opinion.
I will continue to play Civ 5 but I expect changes to be made, hopefully quikly.
And Edgecrusher it wasn't nice of you to call Sogard a tool, no matter how completly true it is. He's entitled to his opinion, even if it is totally wrong. It's obvious that he's completly ignorant of the greatness of former Civ games, and easly impressed, I wish i was so lucky. Thanks for all your hardwork and dedication, I mean Edgecrusher, not toolsgard.
It's a lot more complicated than that. Animations are not simply something that we turned off and forgot to provide an option for. There are underlying technical reasons why they aren't in multiplayer at this time. We will be evaluating what it would take to allow them in multiplayer, but at this time I don't have any guarantee that it will be added. We definitely have heard your feedback on the issue though.
I'm sure you'll understand if I find "It's so complicated!" to be an unsatisfying answer.
Multiplayer animations are a basic feature. It was a feature we had in Civ IV. Please explain to us what it is about the animation system in Civ V that is so technically different from Civ IV that you decided it was best to leave this option out.
Is a real explanation too much to ask for?
I'm going to take some wild guesses at a translation.
Having recently gone back to playing Civ IV multiplayer (as I prefer having animations) the biggest difference I noticed is that Civ V uses more FX in combat. Add in the fact that those FX (see ranged attacks) play from point to point on the map (and units have hit reacts?) and there is definitely some changes between how combat visuals in Civ IV are different than the combat visuals in Civ V. Throw in the fact that there is timing involved - couple that with simultaneous turns, and you can start to see where allowing "slow" FX and animations playing from point to point where targets may or may not be there and you can see some red flags. What happens if the target you are "shooting" moves? Does it need to lock your unit down in order to play the FX? Does that muck with simultaneous turns? Then what about performance? What if 16 players are all on screen firing off FX simultaneously? What happens? Can the game handle it? Seems like there's definitely some reasons why this isn't an easy fix and why it was left out (despite the fact that some people state don't want them). Throw in combat audio and it gets even more tricky. And that's just the combat animations. You'll notice that it also means there is an issue with "movement" animations and in MP your units just blip across the terrain. There could also very well be issues with the animations to "move" causing conflicts with the fact that you can now move spaces in more directions. What happens if you and I both have units that want to run to the same square? Does it start playing the "move animation" for both our units, then when one of us gets the the final hex, the other unit is stopped mid-run animation? Is it sent back to the start square? I'd imagine there are weird issues like this. Who knows, I'm not exactly a programmer - but seems like there's some tricky business.
Do I hope that Faraxis can find a way to make it all work? Heck yes - especially so wifey and I can go back to our Civ V LAN games. Do I care if it means having to remove simultaneous turns? Not so much, although it wouldn't be my favorite trade off.
In the end, we've decided to go back to the awesomeness of CivIV Complete with all its Mods for now when we want to play some LAN.
Hope my banter provides some clues (albeit guesses) about what might be the issues.
So maybe not firing half your team who was working on the game would be a good start
also is there a reason why we can't save a game properly and in the folders we want, and a load a game normally from the folders we choose to load it from...
is there a complixty there?
Last edited by asurania; 10-07-2010 at 09:57 AM.
The game can handle it just fine if it's programmed to do so.
It's funny, somehow programmers managed to resolve these issues 15 years ago in the first RTS games (Warcraft and Command & Conquer). All the game needs to do to solve every one of these issues is determine who moved (or attacked) first, execute that animation, and ignore the other potential animation(s) - or queue them to execute second, third, etc. Decidely uncomplicated.
Last edited by Beliathon; 10-07-2010 at 12:14 PM.
I have the impression that very few - to none resources are allocated for the multiplayer part of the game. Sorry, many facebook / browser games have a more polished multiplayer experience. And now 2 weeks after release Iam starting to get really really worried and pissed of regarding the current state of the affair. The whole its complicated staement regarding "annimations" in multiplayer shows simply how few resources are given to solve these issues as other players pointed out concepts to it are easy to come up with and /or exist in other games already.
I can( could even understand that the game went gold without the multiplayer part not finished and between "going gold" and release the month was spend on bugfixes and have the multiplayer ready with a patch.
now after 2 weeks after release...nothing not even a road map what Firaxis thinks about multiplayer in its current state. Heck for all we know they are quite happy as it is. Its like the dissaster with multiplyer in Civ 3....even the expansion adding multiplayer was a real dissaster.
And even if combat animation in themselves don't sute multiplayer, there is no reason in that regard to not include movement animations.
Sorry Greg but thats not really acceptable is it. I mean animations are not some ultra new or previously unseen thing in multiplayer gaming.
Would you consider it acceptable if the next big FPS (even one designed primarily as a single player experience) shipped without animations in the multiplayer part? Or if the next big role playing game did? Or indeed pretty much any AAA game for that matter? I don't see what makes Civ so special that simply claiming there was/is some "technical reason" why animations aren't available for a significant and advertised portion of the game is deemed acceptable by 2K.
At the end of day any and all games have technical hurdles to overcome to make the gameplay that folks should realistically expect from a modern day game possible. The job of the devs and the publishers is to make sure those hurdles are overcome intime for release and in the event that they can't be they should either put back the launch date or make a point of informing everyone what is missing and when it can be expected to be added. Preferably the former if its a feature that is fairly fundamental to the enjoyment of a significant section of the game for many people.
Hell if "it was hard" was an acceptable excuse then we'd all still be playing 2d side scrollers.
At the end of the day you either support multiplayer or you don't. If Civ 5 was single player only game and was advertised as such then I would accept that. I wouldn't of bought it probably but I would of accepted it. But if you advertise multiplayer and then fail to provide something as basic as animation in 2010 because you failed to develop an engine that was capable of supporting it then you need to seriously look at your programming and or project development talent because there is something dangerously wrong there.
I own a computer repair company and when we repair a computer for a customer they expect it to work. If I handed back a laptop with a broken monitor after charging for a repair only to tell the customer "there were underling technical reasons why I couldn't fix the monitor, that'll be £50 for the rest of the repair please" they would tell me where to go... And rightfully so.
Last edited by CoreDave; 10-07-2010 at 03:30 PM.
@Core Dave very well said.
@Core Dave
Agreed, and very well put. I love this game so far in single player wvwn though quite some bugs, but tis just seems to be the fast and easy way out, without any information of it before release.
While I can appreciate the dilemma the team is in to fix it, this isn't really a good excuse.
Honestly, if there are technical problems to prevent this in multiplayer, the game should not have been designed that way to being with. Civ V was advertised from the beginning to have a strong multi-player focus. Knowing this you should not have designed a game which required all the bells and whistles of single-player to be removed in order to play multi-player games.
This is another way of saying animations will never be added to multiplayer.
Which is in turn another way of saying many longtime customers will never purchase another Firaxis title.
TOO WELL SAID !!!
CoreDave with that one you have make sure no 2K will ever answer this post again !
Anyway 2k/Firaxis do not have the competence for developing Civ. And they showed it well with that release.
QF MFT
That was Awesome Dave.
Yep, well said, Dave.
Greg, we (or "I", but I hope it's "we") definitely appreciate at least hearing that you and the devs have heard us. Every bit of communication helps, even if it's just acknowledging the issues.
However, we definitely need to start hearing some of the why's, how's, and when's about the state and future of the game.
We've paid good money for this product, and I'd like to think that generally we're a fairly intelligent group of consumers (ie compared to Counter-Strike kiddies - sorry to stereotype any of you if you're here^^), and so the usual "we're working on it" etc doesn't fly when things are this bad/unfinished. We require details and explanations. It shouldn't be that the game has only been out a couple weeks, it should be that the product we paid good money for a couple weeks ago is still riddled with bugs and issues and we have yet to hear any significant details or explanations. This just isn't how you treat customers, in any business, if you want to keep long term relationships with them and get future business.
My friend and I bought the game on release day because of past relationships with your company (ie the game). This is not something we will likely ever do again, unfortunately. Whether we buy the next game from you anywhere remotely close to launch depends entirely on what happens in the next week or two, otherwise we'll almost certainly wait for it to be out for a long while and in the bargain bin and after lots of patching before buying.
Very frustrating seeing that Civ 5 desktop shortcut just begging me to click on it, but we just can't bring ourselves to even try and get a new game going let alone ignore the bugs and missing features.
Anyway, Sorry for the rant. But we just tried to start our first games in a few days and couldn't get past the first turn w/o crashing (that was a new bug for us actually, CTD on end-turn). So I'm extra sensitive/bitter still :P
Edit: just wanted to add this isn't a personal rip of you or any of the community team, more directed at the devs/management who provide you with the info and give you the permission to share it.
Last edited by Kosh; 10-08-2010 at 07:05 AM.
Well Said Dave!!!! Quoted you because you said how i feel about it better than I could have.
Ok battle animations maybe are technically difficult to implement now, but how about TURN BASED play in multiplayer mode???? Are you suggesting that this is technically difficult too??
taking our money for an unfinished sub-standard product was technically easy I guess and then finding lame excuses for not correcting major flaws like movement animations (for sure easy to do!!) and turn based play...so dissapointing really
From my experience, the animations in CIV 4 were actually very detrimental to game play. Say players France and Germany are at war, and the person playing Egypt is happily on the other side of the world knowing nothing about this war.. Unfortunately, because the Germany player had animations on, the game would seemingly randomly pause the turn timer countdown for every player in the game while it showed the animations to the German and French player. Poor Egypt would have to put up with constant delays while the animations did their stuff in a battle that he had no awareness of.
This is why in the MP community, we basically screamed at everyone to turn the damn animations off while they were playing MP.In this case, they just didn't give you the option to get screamed at.
That's really just an argument to make it a switch for the gamehost to have animations or not, not really one to rip them out completly. Let the host decide, and the game will flow the way the people playing it will, no reason to join a game with animations if you don't want them, and vice versa, just ripping them out with no warning, that's where I have a problem.From my experience, the animations in CIV 4 were actually very detrimental to game play. Say players France and Germany are at war, and the person playing Egypt is happily on the other side of the world knowing nothing about this war.. Unfortunately, because the Germany player had animations on, the game would seemingly randomly pause the turn timer countdown for every player in the game while it showed the animations to the German and French player. Poor Egypt would have to put up with constant delays while the animations did their stuff in a battle that he had no awareness of.
This is why in the MP community, we basically screamed at everyone to turn the damn animations off while they were playing MP.
Last edited by Autolo; 10-09-2010 at 01:08 PM.
Well what they did with Civ5, is Parental restriction !
Haven't you notice ? this sequel is for kids. So our parents (2k/firaxis), make sure we are good children . . .
Thanks for the answer Greg! I am no software devoloper so I will not talk out of my rear and say 'You can put these in game, you just aren't trying hard enough!' when I have absolutely no experience to back that statement up. (Other than I played this game or that game. Wow some of these posters are silly. )
Just so you know, I for one, am for taking all animations out of Multiplayer. All they do is slow the game down and create what appears to be lag at some point. That little icon that glows? Take it out! It appears while my workers are working they are still somewhat animated- please take that out too as I would think the game would play much smoother and cleaner if these were not in. (Yes, I'm being serious. I am for no animations at all in multiplayer! )
Anyone calling Multiplayer 'broken' because they don't have war animations, that is just silly. I think we have seen numerous other posts about this game being broken. A missing idea or concept YOU WANTED IN does not constitute the game being broken. It might not be exactly what you want, but broken? Not even close.
Flat out... I do not believe you.
I do not believe you are playing stable 8 HUMAN player CivV games into the late ages without MASSIVE amounts of wait time between turns.
Of course, I have only been able to get two 4player multiplayer games working and neither lasted into the AD era due to disconnections. I've probably had to reload Civ5 100 times just from trying to join games in my "regional" lobby.
I really didn't think multiplayer could get worse than Gayspy. But eventually by the end of Civ4 BTS, I could play stable 10 player human games into the late ages no problem.
Now can't even play a 4 player game.
I love single player, but this abomination of multiplayer really makes me dissatisfied with Civ5.
Big, big "LOL" that MP animations are an issue. You were a noob if you didn't turn them off in civ4. Why the hell would you want them in civ5? There's a lot more important (nay, CRITICAL) things that need to be tackled for MP.
Unbelievable!
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