Apolyton Weekly Survey II: Bugs

[Locutus]

This thread marks the second edition of our Apolyton Survey feature, in which we poll our community on various issues related to Civilization IV. Our question for this week may stir up some more emotions than the first edition:

How stable and bug-free do you expect Civilization IV will be?

The question applies primarily to the out-of-the-box version of the game, but it also has some options for any patches that may or may not follow. Note that the answers are intended to be from best to worst, so "Buggy" is worse than "There will be bugs". Effectively, the out-of-the-box game can be graded on a scale from 1 to 9, whereas for the patches there are 3 options available for the choices where this is relevant (when the game is neigh perfect or just utterly unplayable patches aren't going to make much of a difference).

'Bugginess' should here be seen in the widest sense of the word: everything from graphical glitches to CtDs (crashes to desktop) to hardware incompatibility (within the norms of the minimum requirements) to gameplay imbalances or (unintended) cheats.

Feel free to use this thread to explain your expectations in more detail, to compare Civ4 with Civ3 or other games you've played or to discuss the role of patching in the gaming industry in general...

[Gramphos]

I want yin's opinion on this . Where is he?

[Solver]

I expect and want the game to be free of major bugs on release, and patches to fix the existing bugs and minor problems. By major bugs I mean game-stopping bugs, such as the Civ3 submarine bug that was present in the release version or air power not working at all in Civ3.

I also hope the game won't have crash to desktop bugs. This is where I have to give Civ3 credit, it didn't crash on me at all.

I'd say these expectations are reasonable. I'm pretty sure, though, that the game will need a patch or two subsequently for bug fixing, because that's how game development works. No matter how good the playtesters do their job before the release, they're no match for the thousands of players who all have the game after it's released.

[Gramphos]

Being optimistic by natureIhave to votefor mostly bugfree and any bugs will be fixed with a few patches. (A PC game without patches hasn't existed for a very long time)

[Solver]

A game without patches is now impossible, especially a complex game such as Civ. Now that the userbase for a game is over a million, bugs are spotted at a very good rate.

[Gramphos]

Originally posted by Solver
A game without patches is now impossible, especially a complex game such as Civ. Now that the userbase for a game is over a million, bugs are spotted at a very good rate.

Have you ever seen a patch to a console game like Zelda?

It's all about how specific you want to make your system requirements

[Nikolai]

"There will be bugs, some will be fixed, some won't be"

Only a few developers, like Paradox, actually commit themselves to fixing the game properly. Firaxis is not one of them. But I suspect they will be as supportive as they were with Civ3.

[Zoid]

Mostly bug free, nothing a patch or two can´t fix.

Hopefully Firaxis and Take Two has learned something with the hurried crap that was the out-of-the-box version of Civ III. Only a utter fool would make that mistake twice

[Alex]

There will be bugs, some will be fixed, some won't be.

We all know there will be bugs. And I'm fairly sure Firaxis will fix the most glaring ones, especially in the case of "technical" bugs ("technical", for me, are those bugs related to hardware incompatibility, installation problems, memory leaks, CTDs etc.) The "gameplay" bugs (i.e., bugs related to how gameplay works, the rules of the game etc.) will be fixed by Firaxis too, but there will always be some bug - remember that sometimes patches also introduce new bugs in the game.

But if the modding capabilities are really good as they say, then I'm sure that the community will fix most of the bugs that can be fixed using the tools they will provide.

[GeoModder]

Indeed. There's nothing to stop a modder from fixing issues.
The only problem is then how to spread such a corrected version throughly, to avoid players being unable to play with one another in MP.

[Dale]

Mostly bug free, nothing a patch or two can´t fix.

It is nigh on impossible for developers to accomodate for every hardware combination possible, so there WILL be hardware related bugs.

I also expect a game bug or two. Hopefully with this public testing team that are working on the game all the logic bugs will be gone before release though even if there are a couple of game bugs.

Dale

[Sirotnikov]

So what's with the 16 options poll?

I think it'll be mostly bug free.

[TechWins]

I'm undecided on this. What constitues as a bug? An actual glitch or hardware problem with the game? If so then I'd imagine it will be mostly-bug-free but could be patched in a couple tries. Although more glitches may arise after more gametime has been expended; it's hard to say in regards to this. If a bug also includes gameplay problems, then I would think it will be fairly-bug-free but again mostly could be fixed in a few patches but with more problems arising as more gametime is expended.

Wow, does that make sense?

[Paddy]

"There will be bugs, some will be fixed, some won't be"

They have done this before, they will do it again

They abandoned the Civ III community with uncompleted patches...

[Tassadar500]

Originally posted by Paddy the Scot
"There will be bugs, some will be fixed, some won't be"

They have done this before, they will do it again

They abandoned the Civ III community with uncompleted patches...

Unfortunately, I agree.