The official release date has been announced: Galactic Civilizations III launches on May 14, 2015.
Stardock is extremely pleased to welcome everyone to the beginning of a long and glorious era of space-conquering excellence. Whether you prevail through diplomacy, cultural supremacy, scientific research, or the more traditional "crush all rivals with extreme force" method, Galactic Civilizations III gives you the tools to remake the galaxy in whatever image you desire.
We humbly thank all of our Founders and beta players for their support and for their ongoing help in making Galactic Civilizations III the best game it can be.
The end of beta is nearly upon us, but the future in store for space emperors everywhere is full of possibilities.
Congrats on the launch! I am confident that the game will continue to see improvement and refinement after release.
I agree, its been a loong haul. Congrats to all the team.
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to participate in the growth and direction of Galactic Civilizations III.
Yay!!!!!
Good job to all involved. It has been fun (already).
Let us rule together like father and son.
Wow...cant believe its that soon...then again...maybe it feels short because we have been doing this for awhile now haha. Congrats and I know this will be a hit!!
Hmm, unless Beta 6 is amazing, I think 3 weeks is a bit optimistic. There are still some major stability problems (crashing combat viewer in particular), balancing problems, and playability issues that need a lot of work.
One thing to consider from Stardock's perspective, most of the Founder's and beta testers have been playing GC for years.
As long as they take care of the crashes and major bugs, the average new player is not going to be as sensitive as we are to balancing problems and little issues that piss us off.
I have not had a crash in 5.2 or 5.3, only the pirate anomaly hang-up that B6 is supposed to fix. I do have a quad gaming computer though, so I do wonder if it will be okay for dual core and/or a lot of lap tops. Those biggest maps may be a problem.
I cannot say anything about the crashes - I don't really experience that many. But the rest of the issues you mention are indeed cause for concern from my point of view as well. Too many mechanics have changed - heavily - in the past couple months and frankly, it looks like GC3 needs a few months of polish for balance, playability and better mechanics integration. Basically, it suffers heavily from the Frankenstein syndrom : lots of good ideas but not yet well integrated into the game to make a seamless whole.
I have to say, I agree and hope they aren't being to optimistic with it being ready for prime time by then, lets hope Beta 6 is here soon and looking good, 3 weeks is not long.
Don't get me wrong the current build is fun, but it doesn't look three weeks from full release IMO, I do not want the game to flop because it's not quiet ready when they release. I know it will get plenty of love after launch and that's fine for us who have been with it since the alpha test. But people who are expecting a release quality game will not be so causal about it if it's not up to scratch.
As Beta testers it matters little to us when the game is released, since Stardock always continue to polish and improve their games after release, the release version to me might as well be another Beta.
Releasing it as soon as possible is in Stardocks financial interest, as every extra unplanned day in development before launch is budget overrun, which will eat into eventual profits.
Releasing before the game is ready could however be a disaster, and after Elemental they can’t really afford to do that again.
From what I remember of the original schedule they are already past the target release date, so there will be pressure to release.
However since they plan to continue development post release anyway and so have budgeted for that, I would suggest getting a high quality release out is much more important than releasing quickly; profits will be better in the long run and the future of the game will be assured.
I agree with Econundrum1 on this, that I just consider release another upgraded Beta. We will get a 'day 1' patch quickly after and then there will be free content patches/fixes for free of course. I expect the first DLC's to be about 2 months after and a full expansion about 6 to 9 months after May.
I am a bit concerned that the average new player will be unable to figure out how to play the game if some simple issues are not fixed. If the tooltips are unreadable because the text clipping is not fixed, if the descriptions of techs and improvements are simply wrong, etc, the player new to 4X games might simply give up when unable to decide what to do next.
I think there really need to be some guidelines on the game start menu about the sort of RAM requirements to get playable performance out of certain Galaxy sizes and number of players, just to manage people expectations.
I'd agree that to a new player GC3 is not the most approachable game, some good tutorials will fix that.
There are other bug bears I have like synthetics getting planetary events to do with food and organic diseases that makes no sense mechanically or flavor wise, and I don't think they have any intention of fixing that prior to release from what's been said.
Mostly though I think they need to look at balance, typos, graphical glitches, crashes, and UI issues.
ultimately I'm hopping I'm underestimating how much further along Beta 6 is from 5.3 in terms of these things, but while the currently published bug fix list looks promising the proof will be in how it plays.
I may have missed it... are there plans to use the Steam Workshop for mods?
The game is definitely fun, but I have yet to play a game without a crash to desktop. I consider it a feature, since it is a forced stop that lets me get some sleep before I have to go to work the next day, but the crashes should be taken care of at least before the game is released.
My largest issue right now as well, all others I can deal with stability issues is hard to get past, however, I believe Stardock will correct this by release if not in beta 6.
OMG! Not 5 days before Witcher. What have you done to me!?
I have yet to see Beta 6, but I don't think the game is going to be ready in just 3 weeks. Maybe 6 weeks, but 3 is too optimistic.
^^^^^^
This right here. 3 weeks is too much of a mad dash to the finish line for any kind of polish to get done. The game is finally starting to feel like it's almost done, but it's just not there yet. My brother's first impression was that the game still feels like an Alpha rather than a beta. That's not the first impression you want to give the reviewers, or else it'll end up as a black mark on Stardock's record, as well as Early Access games as a whole.
Given how much of a cult classic GC2 was, GC3 has a lot to live up to. This game can't afford to jump the gun, especially not when it's been for sale this whole time as an Early Access game. If it releases still looking like a beta, it'll get torn a new one.
I agree with you on this. Things like the text clipping needs to be fixed and the game must be playable enough that the new player blames himself more than the game if he doesn't understand.
Paul has insisted that there will be a tutorial and I haven't heard that mentioned lately. Even a mediocre tutorial is better than none for a game going for a broad market.
I think they've got this and I hope I am right I have seen worse games released and patched into respectability. Making History II was awful at release but was patched up to respectability.However, it is not really an example of a mass market game. Sid Meiers Beyond Earth was nicely polished at release but crashed horribly for nearly everyone.
You could write a book about what I don't know about the business of PC gaming, so anything I say is mostly blather.
There needs to be a little bit of polishing. " - You are trading with an infadel", for example, needs to have its spelling fixed.
I can't help but feel that you guys are releasing it too soon. I mean yes I am very excited, but I just think another month of Beta is needed to work out all the bugs and exploits.
The developers said on a dev stream to quash user concerns that the game is not ready that it is ready because it is more feature complete than Gav Civ 2 ever was. This is not 2006 guys.
The game has major stability concerns.
The AI is not up to par.
The overall feel and general design just do not feel whole.
If Stardock was my company, I would say look gentlemen, we have a very promising product that we put a lot of work into. But, we do not have an actual game yet. I think six months to a year not three weeks.
Stardock hs not learned from Elemental, that much is clear. I cannot believe they are releasing this in three weeks when they do not have the full confidence of even their most loyal fans.
The release of a game might be based on a economical decision, ie. upfront-money is more worth than late-money (even if the late one is more altogether). That's why there is stuff like Founders, Name-a-star, buy Beta release (I remember times where you were invited to play Beta for free, because actually you are doing their jobs; "hi" Blizzard).
Nevertheless, it worked well with GC2, and if you look at the history of that development you'll see it stopped at the final release of Twilight around a decade after the premier release. DreadLords also was changed multiple times, the 1.53 is different in quite some areas than the initial release. But even in Twilight 2.042 you could still find bugs that were there in the vanilla DL game. Don't get your hopes to high and be realistic - some stuff will never get fixed (even if it is promised, well you don't expect someone will talk their own game down, esp. if it's commercial). Some bugs even become a feature (like the MCC in DarkAvatar) or new updates or bugfixes will introduce new additional bugs (that might be gamebreaking and will never get fixed [eg. Influence Point trading])
Stardock will go on and develop, keep updating, and if things come alike like in GC2, then the most interesting stuff will be released via further addons.
i have not played the latest updates (vers. 5.1+), but i concur with the general wariness expressed here. my biggest red alarm is the amount of new features added shortly before release leaves little room for polish. there are also certain gameplay designs that i feel are very inadequate in 2015, like constructor spam and the very microintensive economy.
Actually I'm not so concerned on the feature complete front more on the serious bugs and issues front.
There are many great features available to you once you register, including:
Sign in or Create Account
