Apolyton Weekly Survey II: Bugs

[Kuciwalker]

This poll is completely worthless.

[Nikolai]

Care to elaborate on that?

[Gramphos]

Originally posted by 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.

I had Civ3 installed on my temporarry computer for some testing with my utilities, and wile it runs OK it crashes each time it exits. I'll patch it soon (and maybe install Conquest also) but I still need to do a few more tests with 1.07f.

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by Nikolai
Care to elaborate on that?

How many bugs do you think it will have? The answer doesn't tell you anything. You might as well poll everyone about "do you think string theory is correct?"

The only honest answer is "I don't know yet".

[Zoid]

So? There is a answer that says that. Let the rest of us guess.

[Nikolai]

Originally posted by Dr Zoidberg
So? There is a answer that says that. Let the rest of us guess.

Exactly.

[DerSchwarzfalke]

How many bugs do you think it will have? The answer doesn't tell you anything. You might as well poll everyone about "do you think string theory is correct?"

The only honest answer is "I don't know yet".

Which makes MarkG and the others jumping on me for my slight pessimism about the bugginess of the game all the more interesting.

Honestly, I hope to hell bug issues are at a minimum and that this game has been playtested into the ground so that the patches are minor fixes rathe than major ones. I am not here wanting Civ IV to fail; I want an enjoyable game that will be worth my $50, seeing as I have not spent that money on a game in some time.

[Lemmy]

Mostly bug-free, nothing a patch or two can't fix

But i do expect many people to complain still because of gameplay imbalances or about things not working how they want them to...but the real bugs will be dealt with

[Ninot]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker


How many bugs do you think it will have? The answer doesn't tell you anything. You might as well poll everyone about "do you think string theory is correct?"

The only honest answer is "I don't know yet".

So we shouldn't discuss anything unless it is fact?

[Kuciwalker]

Normally when we discuss things, we say "I think it should be this way". I don't think anyone would say "I think it should have bugs."

[Ninot]

I dont think anyone is saying it should have bugs

some people are just dreading that it will have bugs, if history is any precedent.

its just something to pass the time, these long months before release.

[MarkG]

Originally posted by DerSchwarzfalke
Which makes MarkG and the others jumping on me for my slight pessimism about the bugginess of the game all the more interesting.

pessimism sucks

[MarkG]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker
The only honest answer is "I don't know yet".

it's fun to make predictions. this' site goal is to have fun. therefore, predicting/hpythetical opinion polls are very oogd way to have fun


that said, i think we established that civ3 was pretty stable out of the box. gameplay bugs are bound to occur in such a complex game. the presence of good-sized long-running beta team is probably going to stop most of these issues before release...

[Gramphos]

Therearesomeays of which you can analyze to see the risk ofbugs,and therisk of bugsnot beingfied. For a PC game thereillalways be issues with somestrange sombinationsofhardware andother software. Something that console gmes don'tsuffer of. That's the reason hy a bugless PC game most likely won't exist. Despite howmush money youput on QA there willbe someone in the many timeslargeraudience that get the released game who will haveissues notfoundby QA.

The ammount of bugs in a piece of code also depends on ho many programmers that have meen maintaining the code. Civ3 was based on Jackal, in the bottomn code that had been around atFiraxis since Civ2, and partly developed by people who left the company. Trying to change and add stuff such code will create new bugs. With ennough time to get into the code there will be less bugs.

Looking back at Civ3 we know it was rushed. Features were dropped from the feature list more or less lastmnute, because they couldn't finish it. Atari madethemreleasethegame atanunfinished state. What would another publisher had done? Most likely not missed the Holiday season if it was possible to get something shape up in time. Civ3 had the releasedate continuously pushed back closer to Christmas all the time, until it was impossible to push it more and still get the game out on time.

Now look forward on Civ4: What is the shape of it now? Well, we don't really know. The videos from E3 look good. I don't remember what shape Civ3 looked at on E3 2001 so I really can't compare them either. Also I have no real experience rom Take2games, and don't how they prioritize QA and bughunting. So why ould Civ4 be different?

Well, foronething the new 3d enginee hoefully means that no old code from Civ2 or Civ3 is left in the game. Alsothere has been no big brak out of Firaxis emploies to form their on company this time, (at least not that I know of) so hopefully any isues related to that for Civ3 is not affecting Civ4. Finally Civ3had no testingoutside Atari QA; for Civ4 Firaxis already have confirmed that 60 handpicked players have been playtesting Civ4 for some time already.

So we got lots of facts to baseour guesses on. Then the final pick you make has to be taken from the fact and mixed ith someof your optimism or pessimism depending on what party^*you are in. From that you should be able to make a qualified guess.

* Before the Civ3 release threere optimists and pessimits, and maybe some more arguing on theforum. Markosgame the keypersonsof the groups special titles,andlet th dscussiongoon for some time, but eventually stopped it when it had turned too mush OT.

[Donegeal]

Originally posted by MarkG
that said, i think we established that civ3 was pretty stable out of the box. gameplay bugs are bound to occur in such a complex game. the presence of good-sized long-running beta team is probably going to stop most of these issues before release...

[conspiracy]MarkG is one of the 60!!! [/conspiracy]