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To be fair...
I don't think the WHO matters so much as the HOW...
My guess is that their use of the new UI toolset they selected had some inherent problems. As a programmer I can tell you that anytime you bring in a library that you didn't build yourself, there are 100% going to be problems. The bigger that library and the more you try to integrate it...the more problems you're going to run into.
All things said...
Their problems appear to be issues that should have been sorted out in QA and unavoidable manufacturing problems which...in all fairness...2K games and Firaxis had nothing to do with.
On the QA side...
I hate to think that they ran it like they ran Pirates! which I participated in. That QA had so few Use Case Scenarios it was painful and that game isn't even close to as complex as this one.
Similarly, upon the final beta release of that game they released this major graphical update that made a lot of people's games fail. When most of the beta testers complained about this problem, they were told that the release date wasn't moving and that a patch would be available immediately after release to address the problem. I never saw the patch, nor did I see the technical problems though so they must have fixed it ahead of time.
So I really wonder if something similar happened with this title. I don't know who runs QA over there but it would appear they have very little game industry experience in running these things, and little to no experience doing QA in a large scale enterprise environment.
Now I don't want to point fingers, but if I had to guess...that's where the weak point was in this whole mess.
I don't think the WHO matters so much as the HOW...
My guess is that their use of the new UI toolset they selected had some inherent problems. As a programmer I can tell you that anytime you bring in a library that you didn't build yourself, there are 100% going to be problems. The bigger that library and the more you try to integrate it...the more problems you're going to run into.
All things said...
Their problems appear to be issues that should have been sorted out in QA and unavoidable manufacturing problems which...in all fairness...2K games and Firaxis had nothing to do with.
On the QA side...
I hate to think that they ran it like they ran Pirates! which I participated in. That QA had so few Use Case Scenarios it was painful and that game isn't even close to as complex as this one.
Similarly, upon the final beta release of that game they released this major graphical update that made a lot of people's games fail. When most of the beta testers complained about this problem, they were told that the release date wasn't moving and that a patch would be available immediately after release to address the problem. I never saw the patch, nor did I see the technical problems though so they must have fixed it ahead of time.
So I really wonder if something similar happened with this title. I don't know who runs QA over there but it would appear they have very little game industry experience in running these things, and little to no experience doing QA in a large scale enterprise environment.
Now I don't want to point fingers, but if I had to guess...that's where the weak point was in this whole mess.