(Almost) everything wrong with modern gaming in a neat little package.
>unfinished base game
>81% on metacritic, 52% user reviews on Steam
>Misuse of the term "early access" to indicate advanced access 5 days early
>5 content packs on release already
>oh wait not all of them are included in the Founders Edition, some are just promises for later content packs
>mobile game UI, a huge mess (maybe because Luigi wasn't there to fix 25% of the UI bugs like in 6....[0])
>mobile game artstyle, Civ4 looked better than this in *2004*
>they switched from Lua to JavaScript since civ6
>horrible performance, crashes, stuttering and ridiculous system requirements
>skin-focused, leader-focused pseudo-RPG "gameplay"
>who needs engineers or auto-explore in a Civilization game anyway?
>empire switching straight stolen from Humankind but worse
>obligatory quests included
>Denuvo, gimped modding "support" (just the usual)
>Atomic Age stripped from the release deliberately, to be sold back to you as DLC later
>AI? that doesn't sell DLCs....
>storefront disguised as a game
yeah this game is a disgrace to Sid
(apologies for the formatting, I'm not good at this)
Cannot support it has horrible performance. Civ 5 and 6 were notorious for having minutes-long turn change times in later eras. Civ 7 seems to finally have fixed that problem for me.
There's some annoying things in it (and also the way they basically copied Humankind leaves a sour taste) but performance it's not, for me at least. It's finally a Civ again with acceptable performance and I hope it stays that way.
This _always_ happens with new Civ games, though. Definitely back to Civ 4 anyway (I don't remember Civ 3, though I assume it existed); I think Civ 2 _was_ seen as kind of perfect on delivery.
Of course Civ 2 had to be perfect on delivery, because there was no online patching back then. Modern tech had made it easier to release unfinished games to test the waters and patch them up later. DLC also didn't exist back then.
Civ 2 actually had a bunch of official and third party expansions, but they weren't as consequential, and it was a complete game without them in a way that its successors were not.
I do recall a mod or scenario where you basically replayed the entire history of Rome in surprising detail. Tons of scripted events.
And obviously the Web was very much up and coming when Civ 2 was released, but I don't think releasing a game through downloads and updating them through the internet was really much of a thing yet when it was first released. As far as I know, everybody ran it from the CD-ROM. Also because that's how you got the awesome advisors (still the best).
The issue is not so much the user scores, but the delta between users and critics. It strongly indicates the publisher is paying off critics (for instance, with access if not cash.)
I mean I think Civ 6 had a similarish delta in the early days.
> It strongly indicates the publisher is paying off critics (for instance, with access if not cash.)
Or just that critics are less temperamental than the average user. If nothing else, the critics have been here before and know how new Civ games go.
Taking a Steam review at random:
> A couple minutes in and it's just... so blatantly unfinished, especially by Civ standards. [...]
I've got to assume from this that this person never actually played another Civ game at launch; the 'especially by Civ standards' is particularly laughable. The last one to feel 'finished' at launch was Civ 2 (or _maybe_ Civ3? I'm drawing a total blank on that one; I know I played it, but I don't remember it at all). Civ4 and on (and _especially_ Civ 6) took a while, and a bunch of patches and expansions, to get good.
(Also quite a lot of the reviews just seem to be indignation that they put Harriet Tubman in it...).
I'll probably pick this up at some point, and will go in with the expectation that it'll be extremely rough around the edges, and get better over the next few years, as is tradition.
Well, why would it imply that "making a game isn't too hard"? No, I'm implying that there's loads of good games. Of course it isn't easy to make them! But it's very much possible and there's many who have done just exactly that. I'd expect better from a big, AAA studio.
I also don't think it's a best-faith assessment of my critique when you mention that I complain about the changed scripting language. It was a fairly off-hand remark and in the grand scheme of things, "let this be the biggest problem in the game". But it is surely indicative of the deeper rot.
I am not alone in this view... just look at the Steam reviews. It's not that I have irresponsibly high standards - they just consistently manage to sink lower and lower.
I think the second one is more likely. People choose languages and ecosystems which fit their way of thinking so naturally, the ecosystem shifts to that direction. This is a self-reinforcing loop :) (one can naturally see this in many languages when the language advocates say "you are just holding it wrong...")
Might I say that this whole safetyist moral panic is very convenient for large corporations? If you can't host your own service due to these concerns, you'll use the cloud :)
It's not a moral panic it's called "an extended engagement with law enforcement will be unpleasant and costly" and you probably don't want that.
And if you're wondering why it's that way, then casually observe everytime people declare that people under arrest or being tried "don't deserve..." something.
The problem here is that we keep acting like the way we should solve this is by having people making toy projects or general purpose tools cower in fear of their own government and stop trying to make anything, instead of establishing a government that can distinguish between violent drug cartels and child abusers vs. innocent behavior or minor offenses and then not inflict senseless damage on the latter.
Government is incentivized and rewarded for finding and punishing violent drug cartels and child abusers. When those become hard to find, the government punishes minor offenses, since it is easy to paint these as hardened criminals, and nobody is in a real position to discover or publicize the actual state of things.
It's more along the lines of, people hear "money laundering" and think this implies some kind of drug ring or terrorism, when it's really some laws so expansive and nebulous that ordinary people frequently do it without knowing, so now there are laws on the books that allow random normies to be charged with a felony at the discretion of the prosecutor.
And these laws tend to take a very specific form: They're laws against things adjacent to other crimes, instead of laws against the original crimes themselves. So this is like, the CFAA putting felony penalties on "unauthorized access" when the implication justifying the penalty is "unauthorized access in order to commit a crime like credit card fraud" and the solution is to put those penalties on the actual fraud. Or "money laundering" which implies an underlying crime to be laundering the proceeds of which implies that it's redundant and they should instead be charged with the underlying crime.
Because what those laws erroneously allow is for someone to be charged with the secondary offense without ever establishing the primary one, or substituting a minor primary offense even though the penalties for the secondary offense were set under the assumption it was a major one. Which is how ordinary people get ensnared.
But we don't need those laws at all because you can charge the actual criminals with their actual crimes, so they should just be repealed, or converted into minor misdemeanors with the heavy penalties instead being imposed on the associated serious crime and only when it actually exists.
Some “adjacent” crimes like that exist because enforcement and/or detection of the original crime is hard and/or expensive. Like gun laws. Or curfew.
I still think that the real problem is the incentives of government; the problem you describe exist simply because government also has the power to create new laws in order to make life easier for itself, at the expense of the governed. I.e. the problem is government prioritizing being seen as useful over actually being useful.
> Some “adjacent” crimes like that exist because enforcement and/or detection of the original crime is hard and/or expensive. Like gun laws. Or curfew.
So we have to do the hard and/or expensive thing instead. It's the government, they spend six trillion dollars a year, "not expensive" is clearly not a thing we're currently receiving as a benefit of the status quo.
In general these laws will be making things more expensive, because investigations, prosecutions and incarceration of people convicted of adjacent crimes but not primary crimes all cost a ton of money for negligible if not overtly negative outcomes. When you throw minor offenders in prison you have to pay to prosecute and incarcerate them and lose the benefits of their contributions to society if they hadn't been incarcerated. It's just setting money on fire, except that in this case (as in many other cases) "money" is really "lives".
> I still think that the real problem is the incentives of government; the problem you describe exist simply because government also has the power to create new laws in order to make life easier for itself, at the expense of the governed. I.e. the problem is government prioritizing being seen as useful over actually being useful.
This isn't really a different problem, it's just asking the question in the form of, given that these laws are stupid how do we bring about a system that doesn't have them and can't pass them anymore?
Linux definitely exists.... except that it isn't free from this philosophy either. From the "don't theme my apps" movement, to Wayland's "security above usability" philosophy... I recently even read about some kallsyms functions being unexported from an 5.x release because it could be used to lookup symbols and it shouldn't be that easy to access internal kernel symbols or something.
Not to mention many projects refusing to add configurability and accessibility, citing vague maintainibility concerns or ideological opposition.
Another blatant example is the 6.7 kernel merging anti-user "features" in AMDGPU... previously you could lower your power limits as much as you wanted, now you have to use a patched kernel to lower your PL below -10%...
Everywhere you go, you can find these user- and tinkerer-hostile decisions. Linux isn't much better than Windows for the semi-casual tinkerer either - at least on Windows you don't get told to just fork the project and implement it yourself.
I'm a bit hesitant to call this corporate greed as it's literally happening in the OSS ecosystem too. Sadly I don't have answers why, only more questions. No idea what happened.
> Everywhere you go, you can find these user- and tinkerer-hostile decisions. Linux isn't much better than Windows for the semi-casual tinkerer either - at least on Windows you don't get told to just fork the project and implement it yourself.
The obvious difference being that in Windows you can't even do that or (easily) apply a patch. Isn't this very ability to patch (or create a fork of) the kernel the opposite of being tinkerer-hostile?
> Linux definitely exists.... except that it isn't free from this philosophy either.
Yes it is, through the power of choice.
>From the "don't theme my apps" movement,
Which anyone is free to ignore and actively do.
> to Wayland's "security above usability" philosophy...
1. wayland is super usable right now and has been for at least a number of years so your statement is mostly a lie. Only thing missing right now are color management and HDR. This impact a small portion of the users who can still fallback to xorg.
2. we are free not to use it. Distributions made it a default choice only recently and you can still install and run xorg, and will so for pretty much as long as you want, especially as some distros are targeted at people not liking the mainstream choices.
> Not to mention many projects refusing to add configurability and accessibility, citing vague maintainibility concerns or ideological opposition.
So you are saying having opinions is bad?
You are still free to use whatever desktop you want or patch your kernel. You have the source and the rights to do whatever you want with it.
> Another blatant example is the 6.7 kernel merging anti-user "features" in AMDGPU... previously you could lower your power limits as much as you wanted, now you have to use a patched kernel to lower your PL below -10%...
I don't think putting safeguards in a GPU driver to make sure users don't fry their expensive GPU inadvertently is an attempt against your freedom. The kernel and gpu driver are still under an open source license that expressly permit you to do the modifications you want.
> Everywhere you go, you can find these user- and tinkerer-hostile decisions.
What is more tinkerable than having the source available and the right to modify them and do whatever you want with it?
I think you are mistaking user and tinkerer-hostile decisions with your and users excessive entitlement mentality. Developers have finite resources and can't possibly agree and accept all users suggestions and desires, and have to put limits on the scope of their projects so they can maintain it, support it and not be overwhelmed by bugs/issues. This is not about freedom.
"I have no idea why" the industry went there. One can understand a technology or a design pattern yet think it's completely idiotic. (low-hanging fruit: JavaScript, containers, etc.)
There were a few things that were difficult to render properly that made the maps incorrect in ways that would really look bad to a veteran player. Like certain cities not having the right links via trade routes (which is a huge part of the game).
I got radio silence from everyone when I tried to confirm the way to correctly determine links. So I moved on to an easier problem.
That is true, but that doesn't mean that someone can't do it anyway. Copyright is a right, not an obligation (unlike trademarks where enforcement is required to preserve the trademark)
If someone makes a patch and publishes it, the rightsholders do have a case against whoever published it, but that requires enforcement in the form of a C&D or a lawsuit. The rightsholder might very well decide to not do anything about it, which happens fairly commonly.
This is not a substantial barrier for making a patch like that.
Yes, genericization is not actually a risk that aggressive lawyers can help you with, except in the sense that if they bankrupt you now it's not a problem any more.
Genericization occurs when more or less everybody uses your word mark instead of a generic product class. But you can't actually sue everybody. And if you chase say, popular media, it just becomes a joke - Stephen Colbert can't use the word literally everybody you know uses because his bosses will get sued, ha ha, but it doesn't stop you and it won't stop genericization from happening. Notice you won't find any courts checking that you spent enough on legal fees as otherwise you lose for inadequate enforcement. They only care that ordinary people, who you wouldn't sue anyway, used this word in a generic way.
Beyond that, it's not at all obvious that this is a problem you'd want to prevent. Why are Kleenex and Xerox so well known? It's surely not because they're unsuccessful!
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