Dear FrogBoy,
I have owned most of your titles since GalCiv1. I enjoyed your creations thoroughly. Now, I was about to buy Elemental after reading how much better it became with patch 1.1. I wanted to buy Elemental because the lead designer of Civilization 5 ruined my civ experience after 20 years of loyal support.
Not anymore. I will not buy any other game that this person touches. I know of many that were thinking along the same lines, and were about to put money into Elemental to run away from the monster that this "lead designer" created and that is not true to the succesful principles that made Civilization the best franchise ever.
With this move, I think you lost a huge amount of potential sales that were about to happen, Brad. I'm sorry. Good luck, you will need it now.
Regards,
You asked for a refund and then bought the game again? Do you have some hidden pleasure in contradicting yourself?
Yeah I am not sure of all the issue. I though Civ V was actually a pretty well designed games. Maybe some balancing issues the early game and slow to start but still a fun game.
I am happy to see you guys adding people to the team in an effort to make this game even better that what is has become. I have been enjoying the most recent update and plan to continue to support you guys.
I'm pretty sure that's exactly what happened.
I'm also pretty sure I'm being sarcastic.
Brad didn't call fans insane. He justifiably called one person insane for ignorantly spouting off.
Ironically, Neverwinter Nights was originally going to be released as a set of mod tools only, but Bioware reasonably feared that it wouldn't sell without some sort of campaign, so the single player game was basically thrown together at the last minute using the mod tools they had developed.
My god there is a lot of stupid in this thread.
All i want just a polished version of Elemental and not another Civ clone .
I'm beginning to notice it is the same guys that have the most insane reaction in these threads...coincidence??
again +1
"Oh noez he ruined ma Civvi now he will ruin ma Elemental!"
What would be even more telling would be to look up their age. I think there would be a trend there. Like younger members of the audience who haven't lived through three decades of game development from the Atari 2600, to the C64, all the way to present consoles.
They started at the console end.
Nuff said.
Edit: Now wheres my asbestos suit.
I never played Civ V as I didn't like the reviews it received. I waited until 1.1 of Elemental was released before purchasing.
All of this garbage about Elemental being tainted by Jon is nonsense. I'll take a seasoned designer any day to work on my projects. Has he made some mistakes in the past, surely, but haven't we all. Any competent person LEARNS from their mistakes which makes their future projects that much better. As I have stated in other posts, I will wait to see what Brad and company produce before making a judgment.
I would be remiss if I didn't point out my number one peeves, the CTD and OOM anomalies. If that could be addressed in the next release, this customer and I think others, would be happier.
You didn't go back far enough. My love for video games started when they could only be found in arcades.
Oh yeah...and the reviews gave it a 9/10, too. It must be true!
Brad has really a lot of courage to hold all the knocks he got up to now... Let's just see how things will devellop before crying to a disaster. We don't know all the soup that was behind Civ 5 so maybe this guy has something with the Civ5 mediocrity or maybe not... Let's just see what he will do now and here. When we shall see the results... Then we can complain... Or not.
Nobody argues that Brad is always right nor does anybody want to dismiss the people that make the community. But it is indeed uneducated to condemn the Ex-Lead-Designer of CiV for having ruined a franchise and to assume he would ruin another. Just ridiculous.
You need at least some knowledge about the gaming industry rather than "good intuition" to judge a "messed up" game.
I would recommend to read Brads first reply to the OP carefully.
Brads original post has more right in it than wrong but the one thing I will say is that it's a complete falsity that people with ideas are rare. Ideas are a dime a dozen, the difficult part is finding something that your publisher wants to publish.
I mean as a games programming student I've heard atleast 50 well developed ideas this year that would make absolutely fantastic games, which I would buy. But innovation is often left to the side lines in favor of the safe approach that's almost garunteed not to flop.
As for hiring the ex-lead designer of Civ V it's a better idea than it looks. Civ V if nothing else tried to bring change and innovation to the Civ franchise, it failed but failing is part of the process.
And be honest, was it a case of bad ideas or was it more a case of good ideas executed in a poor way?
My point was that CivRev is a stripdown, simpler version of civilization. The Op complaints about Jon supposely being responsible for dumbing down the Civilization franchise while Sid himself went that route.
The idea that it failed is opinion, what is your data to support this? Sales? Reviews? What? How is it a failure? I don't accept that as fact, and I am impartial, I have never even played the game.
Of course some blame goes to everyone involved. My point is that attributing the lion's share of the blame to people who more than likely had very little to do with the issues is ridiculous. And saying that he should have left with a partially completed game... No, that really would be worth blaming him for. Instead, he did his utmost best in order to release the game in the best state he could, under whatever restrictions he was subject to.
The ideas in Civ5 were not innately flawed. All the issues attributed to 1upt could be fixed via careful balancing (and possibly the addition of a hardcap on units, so production costs can be dropped significantly), as with the rest of the game's issues. Go back and actually read Jon's explanation for joining Stardock, and Brad's responses in this thread... There are very good reasons many game developers would jump at a chance to join a studio that is independent from publishers.
God knows I would. I've already promised myself I will never work for EA, at the very least.
I agree with the first statement, I disagree with the second. I know that popularity and quality are two different games (so a game isn't bad just because it didn't sell well), but you don't need knowledge about the gaming industry to judge the quality of a game: you need other qualities and knowledge, like being able to dissect and analyze gaming mechanics and the purpose behind them, and an understanding of mathematics/game theory/statistics and probabilities.
maaaan I wish were cool enough to have people boycott things when I got hired
Ima go cry in the corner.
Quoting FrogBoss:
Well if you've been a customer a long time then consider this:
If you listen to the Internet buzz, I'm a moron who couldn't design a game to save his life. Elemental being crummy at launch was due to my incompotetence. I ruined it. That's the Internet buzz. Do believe that?
Nope it was due to insomnipotence, or was it nincompoopotence.. he he.
And the poop did hit the fan at Elementals release, but thats past tense.
The present, and future, looks potenceially bright, with hirings of well known names.
Quoting ne_javarz
I prefer the gamer reviews over journalists .
Recently saw a new game review at GameSpot, “Super Meat Boy”, Game Reviewer score 90+, users score 63, and the game did look (visually at least) like an average game.
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