Civ III In Computer Games Magazine: Wins Game of the Year

[Capt Dizle]

As usual, Yin is correct.

[OneInTen]

Any review by a group of people is naturally going to be biased further towards the centre of the scale.

For example, a rating of just 7.9 out of 10 is enough to put a movie in the top 100 movies of all time in IMDB.

[yin26]

It's not a 'bias' -- it's called a Bigger Picture. And plenty of games with hundred or thousands of player reviews still come in at high 8 or 9+ averages.

And yet there's Civ3...

[MarkG]

yin, dont know if you noticed this, but you took the gamespot reviews definition of a 7-7.9 score and applied it to the users reviews

please dont tell me that all these people voted having in mind the definitions gamespot reviewers use for the "official" reviews...

[Ironikinit]

Gamespot's player reviews were tainted. Disgruntled jerks who thought that because they wasted a large chunk of their lives playing the predecessor to Civ 3 they owned the series posted bogus null reviews to lower the average. In response, other reviewers posted falsely inflated reviews. In other words, the numbers are about as valid as a compulsive whiner's opinions.

Take a look at the quality of some of the player reviews. No thought whatsoever went into some of them, both the favorable and the rabidly disappointed.

Let's not forget that the Gamespot reviewer did address what he considered to be Civ 3's flaws in his review. I find it annoying how self proclaimed experts presume to smugly invalidate the opinions of people have dedicated their professional lives to the industry.

[Dis]

they are player reviews after all.

so a player who doesn't like the game isn't entitled to give his review?

[OneInTen]

Hmm, I went to the gamespot site to investigate their user polls.

I noticed that you can vote without registering, and the site doesn't appear to make any attempt at all to stop people from voting as many times as they wish.

Given that for all we know all those votes came from anywhere between 1 person and 3565 people (at the time of yin26's posting), added with the fact that any web poll suffers from the problem of the voters being self selected, I hardly think we can form any conclusion from it at all, other than at least one person voted, and the votes at a minimum ranged from between 7 and 8.

[Ironikinit]

What I have a problem with is people giving Civ 3 a zero when they don't really consider it a zero. Are they really saying that 100% of the games they've played is better? No. They're saying that they're mad they didn't get the game they wanted so they wanted to do something petty.

Does that answer your question?

Honest reviews are fine by me, unless they're honestly biased and shortsighted.

Edit: I want to make it real clear that I like Gamespot a lot, and that includes their player reviews. I read them, not all of them, obviously, but some. That's how I knew that jerks had been at work trying to smear Civ 3. Even before I started reading Apolyton.

[yin26]

Ha! This is rich. The apologists go to new levels. There are always jerks at either end of the scale. How about the: "I give it a 10! I haven't bought it yet, but Sid is King!" Face it, take out the extremes at either end of the scale and you have a public that is lukewarm about Civ3. And don't give me the 'The reviewer is a professional' garbage. Is this the same reviewer who mentioned that full and robust editor for God's sake!? What a joke.

Sorry it's so hard to accept.

[Ming]

Originally posted by yin26
Sorry it's so hard to accept.

Yeah... it must be hard to accept when so many people disagree with your point of view... different strokes for different folks

[Harovan]

Originally posted by yin26
Face it, take out the extremes at either end of the scale and you have a public that is lukewarm about Civ3.

I suggest you to make a poll here, collect some data and then interpret it at your heart's content. Ignore the 0's and the 10's and make an average. Here's enough players who played more than a reviewer ever would, here's enough who know the Civ/Civ2/SMAC(X) to compare, and it's granted that everyone votes only once.

I wonder what would the result be... And what both sides of this discussion would interpret into...

[Bilas]

Originally posted by Ming


Yeah... it must be hard to accept when so many people disagree with your point of view... different strokes for different folks

Ming... I think There are more people out there that think CIV3 is a good game with flaws then "GREAT GAME... GAME of the year!" Hey I will listen to both sides, play the game and form my own opinion. My opinion is this game is OK to good and could be very good if the FLAWS that are mentioned here an on other sites are fixed.

[Ming]

Originally posted by Bilas
Ming... I think There are more people out there that think CIV3 is a good game with flaws then "GREAT GAME... GAME of the year!"

And I'm one of them... it is a Great Game, and it has it's flaws.
Hopefully some of those will be corrected. Heck, Civ II STILL has flaws, and it's years old, but I still play MP.

I don't expect games to be perfect... I do expect them to work.
And after the first patch, most of the stuff does work. I look forward to future patches... MP... and better editing/moding.
And I"m not going to start whining about it until there is proof that none of it is going to happen. Until then, I remain positive about the game, and I don't need to hear from Firaxis every day as proof that they are working on it.

But my original point was... Yin thinks the game sucks and has no social redeeming value. Many people disagree with that

[Barnacle Bill]

The problem is that most of the people who are buying/playing Civ3, including professional reviewers, are not long-term fans of the series who have been heavily into scenarios, mods, etc... They either never played the previous games (before their time), or just played them in the basic plain-vanilla form, and never devoted much thought to what Civ3 could/should have been based on their Civ2 experience. OK, so it looks better due to an advance in the state of the art in graphics and has a few new features - that must make it better than Civ1/Civ2 - Civ2 was great so if Civ3 is better it must be great, too - "Game of the Year!". As to the "late game tedium", this is believed by most people to be an unavoidable consequence of the TBS genre, so fans of the genre don't hold it against Civ3.

The core fans represent a minority of the buyers (actual or potential). They see beloved features from Civ2 missing, new featured requested by the fan community for years not included, and poor implimentation of such new features as were added (as compared to other TBS games with similar features). They are disappointed to the point of feeling betrayed.

What can/should Firaxis do about it? Well, they were hired by Infogrames to do Civ3. The game is a hit, so Infogrames is happy. Infogrames cares about units sold, not whether the Civnards are happy (be different if it was a nitch product aimed at Civnards, but it's not). Very likely, Infrogrames will not finance any further effort by Firaxis to "fix" Civ3 via free patches, with the possible exception of adding features that were clearly advertised but not yet delivered (a fully functional editor, maybe MP). Infogrames has no incentive to finance anything for which they will get no return. How many more units would they sell if they do a Civnard patch vs if they don't? Firaxis perhaps has more reason to care, because their reputation is on the line, but again the sales & reviews speak for themselves and it would be easy for Firaxis to ignore the Civnards as an excessively vocal minority with little influence on others. Maybe they will care, maybe not.

I think we can expect a fully-functional editor via patches: able to add units, etc... plus place units, cities, civ starting locations, etc... on the scenario starting map. A Civ2-style scripting language is more iffy. If they really did promise MP, there may be an MP patch. I expect anything else will go into an expansion product or "gold edition" that you'll have to buy if you want it. Based on the reviews and sales, though, I expect that there will be such a product (maybe more than one - there were essentially 3 for Civ2). Firaxis will probably try to address the gripes of the Civnards in those products, to the extent that the schedule and tasking from Infogrames permits. In that regard, I hope MP was not promised in such a way that they need to do it as a patch - it is big enough to provide room for piggybacking other things.

[Zoid]

Game of the year, hah! Someone should sue Gamespot for misleading marketing

Congrats to Mark and Dan, anyway!!