Preview in UK PCZone Mag

[GodSpawn]

There's an interesting preview of Civ4 in this month's UK PCZone magazine (the June issue).

There's a tiny interview with Sid, and a few screenshots. It's quite short on details, though.

Looks like they thought that the 550 turns for a Civ3 game was too long, and Civ4 will have more like 400 turns. But there will be three game speeds, "Quick", "Medium" and "Epic". They don't say what these settings do, but I'd guess they would in some way affect the number of turns required to complete the game.

The ETA for the game in the article is "End of 2005" - so that'll be next spring then.

[Spiffor]

If only it could be next spring

Firaxis has a great experience of putting its products on the shelf on time... At the expense that said products are rushed, and shoddy out of the box (Civ3 was sold with a bug that made planes completely unusable)

[Trifna]

Spiffor, was it Firaxis who was responsible or was it their publisher? Because I know that their old publisher had this reputation of rushing unfinished products while their new publisher has the opposite reputation.

Also, notice that some interview with some Firaxis guy (Soren? No idea) mentioned that they thought they had pressured for Civ3 and wanted to do Civ4 differently (they were discussing the idea of including good modding for example).

[GodSpawn]

they were discussing the idea of including good modding for example

In the PCZone preview, they said this about modding (and I quote):

"...the new game will be fully modifiable using XML, Python and SDK."

Hmm, an SDK for modding the game, eh? Sounds cool.

[Trifna]

GodSpawn, could you translate this to a non-programmer? Well I do know how to make sounds with QBasic... What's good/bad of SDK?

[Locutus]

SDK stands for Software Development Kit and is a term that has over the years been horribly abused, particularly by the gaming industry, to refer to anything from a simple scenario editor to a full copy of the original source code and a whole suite of tools to modify it. So basically that throw-away comment in one magazine review doesn't really mean anything, at least until we learn more about it

Thanks for the heads-up on the interview though

[FrostyBoy]

And where are these screenshots then?

[Nikolai]

Yeah! Send 'em over, will ya?



Please?

[Modo44]

Originally posted by Locutus
So basically that throw-away comment in one magazine review doesn't really mean anything, at least until we learn more about it

Wrong (well, in part). The quote is a confirmation that at least parts of the game will by available for those able to use Python and XML (i.e. highly moddable). Only the "SDK" part seems to be throw-away, although I imagine some kind of scenario editor will be included.

[Myrddin]

Oops missed this - there is a bit more detail which I put in a new post

[Vince278]

Originally posted by Spiffor
(Civ3 was sold with a bug that made planes completely unusable)

I always wondered where they dug up their so called playtesters.

[Myrddin]

Not quite

Someone had turned off the intercept ability for some reason, and forgot to turn it back on before release. Fixed in first patch.

[Trifna]

Originally posted by Spiffor
At the expense that said products are rushed, and shoddy out of the box (Civ3 was sold with a bug that made planes completely unusable)

I was not a bug, it was a feature.

[KrazyHorse]

Did they mention whether or not it would suck as bad as Civ3?

[TechWins]

Originally posted by KrazyHorse
Did they mention whether or not it would suck as bad as Civ3?

An unofficial letter from Sid Meier revealed it is not likely Civ4 will suck (from the words of the fans) as bad as Civ3. Sid Meier further mentioned there was consideration naming Civ4 instead - The Real Civilization 3 - but later decided against the idea for marketing purposes and infringment rights against Atari.