Re: MOO3 finished!
 

The playability of Civ III out of the box has is a debate that will run on for ages. I thought that many of the bugs that were in the initial release really killed the game. That's just my opinion. I think the point that is being made here is that there seems to be an alarming trend over the past few years of game companies releasing...well, utter crap, to the public and then coming back and patching the game later, after the profits have been made. If the game doesn't do well, they might not patch it at all! I know the current climate has completely soured me on buying any first release game from a major publisher.

To those who are going to buy it right away, I really hope that it is a great game and that you enjoy it. I would like to see nothing more than the delay turn out to be the software companies desire to squash any and every bug they could find before release. I am a cynic, however, and believe that this might be a major turkey.

Re: MOO3 finished!
 

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">Check your credit card statements carefully. I've had several "free" subscriptions that were automatically renewed for a year after the "free" sub ran out, unless you explicitly told them not to renew it.

Re: MOO3 finished!
 

"That was a hardware problem with people who have sub-standard hardware, and not really a problem with the game itself."

Why is it people always blame the ones having issues, and not the sub-standard program causing it?

Fact is, many copy-protection schemes are crap. Removing the copy protection from Morrowind can give up to a 20FPS improvement! And given the fact that it CAN be cracked, and was done so quickly after the game was released, it isn't stopping pirates at all.

Another time this happened was MechCommander 2. Everyone assumed since they had no problems, no one else did either. Heh. As it turned out, the game had an odd issue that resulted in two files being made. When those files were present, performance went in the toilet. My 1.5 GHz Geforce 4 system got MAYBE 5 FPS with everything turned off. Then I removed those files and got over 30 with everything on. If that isn't a game programming issue I don't know what was..

Phoenix-D

Re: MOO3 finished!
 

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">Considering that I played an entire game before I applied any patches, I don't think that's true. Are you talking about stability or playability here?</font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">Were you around Shrapnel when Civ III came out? If not, try searching for threads about it. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif I don't even remember what was wrong in the initial release anymore, cause I stopped playing the game after a short while. Even now, with all these patches, it still has many major problems.

Re: MOO3 finished!
 

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">Well they've released their fair share of bugged games. Problem is that their games are almost always great to play as well. For example, the greatest game ever produced (after SEIV of course..) Masters of Magic was a Microprose release as well. Playable, but bugged as hell. Good thing they released a zillion patches for it heheh.

Re: MOO3 finished!
 

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">I don't see any problems. It's an expanded and much improved Version ov Civ I, which is looking really dated now. Expanding on what I said, absolutely nobody out of a half dozen people I know who bought the game and didn't patch it right away had no problems whatsoever.

Edit: I've read the "DO NOT BUY Civ 3" thread, and basically, it comes down to Atrocities complaining that he only got a month's worth of play out of a game. If you get a month out of any game before getting tired of it, then I would think it's up there as one of the best of all time.

Then you have people copmplaining about micromanagement. Well, that's what automating your workers is for. They are perfectly capable of handling any and all improvements by themselves.

Further, aside from the crashes which only a minority of people reported, the only real bugs were with precision bombing and air superiority, neither of which were game breakers.

The complaint of the AI producing masses of weak units comes from not realizing that the AI never gets rid of its ancient units that guard its cities, so when trouble comes, you get plenty of warriors and spearmen that have been sitting around for a few milennia.

It's also certainly not infeasible for militarily trained soldiers without firearms to defeat modern armour, especially in a large city, because while they may not have guns, they aren't bronze age people. Unless of course, you think that they have somehow survived for 6000 years.

[ January 26, 2003, 04:28: Message edited by: Graeme Dice ]

Re: MOO3 finished!
 

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">Because it _is_ the hardware of those having issues as the other people don't have those issues.

Re: MOO3 finished!
 

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">I don't see any problems. It's an expanded and much improved Version ov Civ I, which is looking really dated now. Expanding on what I said, absolutely nobody out of a half dozen people I know who bought the game and didn't patch iot right away had no problems whatsoever.[/QB]</font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">See... that is part of the problem. The game is not Civ 3, it is Civ 1.5. Most of the best changes in Civ 2 (hit points and firepower, for example) were thrown out.

Did any of your friends buy the game on the weekend it came out? Cause I did, and it crashed, a lot.

Re: MOO3 finished!
 

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">Because it _is_ the hardware of those having issues as the other people don't have those issues.</font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">Exactly, that's because of substandard programming and testing. Just because Joe's computer runs the game fine, and Bob's doesn't, doesn't mean Bob's hardware sucks. Bob might be able dozens of games that Joe's computer can't.

If I made a game on my computer, and tested and debugged it on my computer to the point of it being bug free, I could then bring it to a very new machine made with top quality parts and experience bugs that never existed.

This is because I was stupid and assumed if it worked right on my computer it must work well on everyone's. This is how bugs are born.

Of course there are ways I can program it to reduce the chances of incompatabilities by making less assumptions on my target audience's hardware and reusing older, 'tried and true' libraries where possible, but in the end TESTING is the key.

And that still doesn't account for gameplay bugs which have nothing to do with the hardware (i.e. the old bug at the end of Act II in NwN).

This isn't to say that poor hardware configs don't cause problems, but they are by NO MEANS the only source of problems.

As Pheonix-D pointed out, problems with copy prot schemes aren't limited to the stupid, or to those with poor system configs (or to pirates for that matter), they WILL screw all of us at least once as time goes on, give it time, they'll get you too!

[ January 26, 2003, 04:33: Message edited by: MacLeod ]

Re: MOO3 finished!
 

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">And so what? Why should it have to make huge improvements on Civ II to be a good game? A game only has to provide five hours of enjoyment to be cost-effective, and anything on top of that is a pure bonus.

The game is still better than it's immediate predecessor SMAC, which has the ridiculous unit design mechanism that allows you to kill attackers armed with the best weapons by putting better armour on you units.

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">Yes, we all did, and it didn't crash at all. Bear in mind that I have no idea what you mean by "crashed a lot". I'd look at a game that crashed once an hour as being perfectly stable, although a little bit annoyning. It's only when crashes start to occur every ten or fifteen minutes that it gets aggravating.