Apolyton Weekly Survey II: Bugs

[alva]

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

Games are becoming more and more complex to make, be it hard or software related, with a regretable side effect that their will be bugs.

[DerSchwarzfalke]

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

Let's face it, this game is being rushed for a holiday release, and there will be both unresolved hardware and gameplay issues that will cause the first batch of us to go buy the game problems. Firaxis is no different than any other major developer in their "release it first, release patches later" mentality.

[MarkG]

Let's face it, this game is being rushed for a holiday release

and how exactly do you know it's "rushed"? do you happen to have a copy and now if it has bugs or not?

[Paddy]

Originally posted by MarkG

Let's face it, this game is being rushed for a holiday release

and how exactly do you know it's "rushed"? do you happen to have a copy and now if it has bugs or not?

good point

it certainly will be good to get Civ IV

it would be fantastic if the new code and the great team they have working on it (yeah some of this very community) can come out with a perfect programme

I for one do let the experinces of the past colour the picture of the future...

more power to them

[planet]

It will be perfect!

[Robert]

I'm very optimistic.
It's a total new engine, I think Firaxis has been working for a long time on this as well.

of course there'll be some bugs, but nothing a patch or two can't fix.

[DerSchwarzfalke]

and how exactly do you know it's "rushed"? do you happen to have a copy and now if it has bugs or not?

Call it 'experience, combined with imperfect information.' For all I know, Firaxis has a genius coder who runs on coffee and diesel who will make this the most bug-free game they have released to date. What I do know, though, is they have that November release date looming over them -- whether the game will be finished or not. Hence my pessimism.

[MarkG]

What I do know, though, is they have that November release date looming over them

late 2005 has always been the plan...

[Zoid]

...and Take Two isn´t Atari (I hope )

[Solver]

Late 2005 has always been the plan, Firaxis actually said Winter and not november (November was supposed to mean November 1st, Winter likely means Christmas holidays, a month and a half extra), and Take Two is generally known to be a good publisher, so I expect they are going to give Firaxis the time they need to finish the game. Note that there is not exact release date for Civ4 yet - which is also a sign that they're looking at how the development goes before announcing a date.

[MarkG]

plus, civ3 worked fine on my pc out of the box

[Solver]

It worked on my PC, too, but it still had a ton of bugs . Civ3 was good in how it would very rarely crash, not crashing at all for most people, and how it had good hardware support. Yet, out of the box it had a few game-breaking bugs, such as air power not working.

[Ninot]

Solver beat me to it, but i was gonna mention the airpower thing too.

[hexagonian]

Originally posted by DerSchwarzfalke
Let's face it, this game is being rushed for a holiday release, and there will be both unresolved hardware and gameplay issues that will cause the first batch of us to go buy the game problems. Firaxis is no different than any other major developer in their "release it first, release patches later" mentality.

I actually think that this game will not be rushed - at least to to the degree that civ3 was (regarding balancing) and PTW was (regarding multiplay). Seems like this game has been in a playable state for some time (Firaxians playing/multiplaying the game had been reported a while back), and I suspect that there has been some solid beta playtesting going on for some time too.

The game may suffer from some subtle playbalancing issues that are subjective in nature, but I feel the initial release will be stable in issues like CTDs.

[Addled Platypus]

mostly bug free,

not that bad of a bug history to me.
still the number one game I play

whats the case history of Take2 and buggy games?

Just ship it and soon