I would really like to point out some things here. This goes hand in hand with my previous post with RavenX about systems. This poster is stating that on Steam forums there is "One bad review after another".
Yet the reality is the actual game review sites to this game are giving it very favorable reviews, both in Gameplay and performance. Why?
Because Game review sites typically have rigs like ours, better if not MUCH better than average and they can play BIG maps and not stutter. Also Game review sites have UPDATED drivers and know how to optimize windows outside of gaming. The honest fact is GCIII is a great game and runs great, if you have a reasonable system and you are not doing silly things like disabling the page file or running video drivers from 2014.
Thankfully, Steam complainers are a (negative) vocal minority as we are (positive) vocal minority. Unfortunately people as a whole tend to 'see' negative reviews faster than the positive ones.
I have to admit, I use metacritic as a base filter for games. I look at the ones that are critical, but mostly those on the border. I ignore ones that throw out zeroes because that is a rage fest. I also ignore the highest ones because those are fan boys.
Those that criticize because it plays like another game they don't like, but I do, become a favorable review to me.
Those that say it is too hard also become favorable to me.
It better damn well have replayability. Something that has 30 hours of content or less I will only pick up on a step sale.
Have I ever been let down by a game? YES! CA usually has a boom/bust release cycle, but they usually get things better. While maybe not as fast as I like, they get to at least decent. I have some games I have played very little of.
Stardock is the one company I KNOW will go out of there way to make things better. Amplitude also does a nice job. Firaxis is slow, like CA, but they improve their games as well.
I honestly don't understand the rage of most users. I understand frustration, especially if it crashes. However, I go nuts checking drivers and other things before I go bother to post.
These "Good old days" of "perfect games" out of the box never existed. There were several games I bought that stunk to high heaven and there were no patches or maybe one to two, but nothing even on the level of what Stardock has already released. That said, there were a few companies that did make sure it was close to being as good as possible. Microprose comes to mind.
Really developers can't win today. If they waited until it was perfect, people would say it was vaporware. If they release it and have an update or two in a couple of weeks, it was released too soon.
I feel that if a developer released a game in "perfect" condition, then people would complain there weren't any updates and they are abandoning the users. Especially if DLC comes out.
How much did they spend on WoW for the game, expansions AND a monthly charge?
Also, realize that these games released 15-20 years ago would cost more now than they were then. $50 in 1995 is $77.62 now. 1990 just over $90. So people want all that older games had, plus more, for less. Imagine what would happen if they released the game at those prices!
Life is too short to get worked up over a game.
@nas
All the more reason why comparing with Civilization V is relevant. Today, Civ V has an over 90% positive Steam review score. And yet, when it first came out, there were practically riots. Luckily, there were no Steam reviews. Over time, the game has evolved (As 4Xs do) to its current state.
Regarding the reasons you mention for bad reviews, totally 100% agree with the 3 major reasons.
1. It's not <Game X>
2. It's not GalCiv II: Ultimate edition + every imagined feature I always wanted
3. It's crashing for them.
We can address 1 an 2 and are over time.
I have to agree with the OP, official game reviewers tend to be more honest than the average player, despite the stereotype that all gaming reviewing sites are buy outs.
But I'm still VERY concerned with those negative Steam reviews. I have developed a love towards GalCiv III and its devs, so I obviously don't want the game to fail. I've already made my positive review here, but still.
The fact that steam keeps the early access reviews is stupid and disadvantageous.
However, there was still a lot of early access positive reviews and on opening week the reviews were at 91% for a little bit. Now however, in the two weeks or so after they have fallen to 74% (last time I checked). That's why in my other post I asked what can Stardock do to change your mind to positive? A lot of the negative reviews I've read are crashing or AI related, so once those issues are resolved change your review to positive. The bad thing is most of those won't change it even if they end up loving the game.
Every game has things that people dislike, there is always something. If it's features I can and always will look past them (unless I just simply don't like the game.) If the game is physically unplayable, crashing or horribly unbalanced, small then I blame the company and rate poorly.
Galactic Civilizations III is not broken, it's not horribly unbalanced, and fits along with the rest of the Galactic Civilizations games. So all in all I may have my complaints which have already been discussed but, I enjoy the game and appreciate everything Frogboy and Stardock do for there customers.
Im not sure I understand this. The thread is about
Im not sure I understand this. The thread is about gaming reviews and their legitima-lazy... Also alternative methods of reviewing and gathering perspective on the game. Take a hike and come back in a few months isn't what the gaming reviews are saying. Its great, very good, expands on the original, but what they aren't saying is, it is better than the previous iterations. I also feel that comparing the release state of Master of Orion 1.0 and Gal Civ 3 1.0 apples to apples is unfair to both games as one is much smaller and simpler and was released in the pioneer era of PC gaming, and the other is much more complex and released 22 years later in the era of lets ship now and patch later. Master of Orion also had a great manual and a 300+ page strategy guide. I haven't even located the manual for Gal Civ 3.
One of the things as simple as Master of Orion was that it did far superior, and without the benefit of months of an open online community of zealots payign $100 for alpha access, online gaming sessions on twitch and the modern PC gamer, was it explained what was going on. It was clear to see what effect technologies were having and what was going on. As if you had a transparent hood covering the engine of your galactic empire. Gal Civ 3 is entirely more ambiguously indifferent about sharing what the hell is going on in your empire. This modifier does this +10% or -10% this but it doesn't help you clearly understand which one will help you more. Technology does that but in terms of what you can visually see sensor range and speed on the map are the features that appear to be the most visible.
I recognize that product is different than its predecessor and different than other products. What I don't yield is that it should be acceptable for it to crash for anybody -Just poor QA, and that it should not play like tits on the recommended type of PC.
Look today is 5/30/2015. I built this computer in March of this year so all of the components were procured in 2015. Installed Windows in March, drivers are current, Windows is 64 bit, ram is 32 GB, CPU is 8 core AMD FX-8350 Overclocked, video card is GTX 970, storage is on external USB 3.0 and an SSD, game and OS, pagefile etc. are on the SSD obviously so I am confident it is an early release issue. I don't have the best rig money can but but I do have one that is modern and will post within 20% of anything someone can put together for under $2500. I just feel like it was put out too early and that more development and polish should have been allocated before release. I also feel none of the gaming reviews even indicate that which is why I feel they are irrelevant reviews. Years ago I did a study on why this is and the conclusion is similar to journalism of all forms, they are businesses in business to make money but selling you information, and information that damages their complementary commodities such as the products they review fail to garner fair and honest reporting. I can point to other examples but I really only need to point to one.
Simcity 2013.
Please do not take that as inference that I am in any way comparing Gal Civ 3 to Simcity 2013 because it is not and I am not. I am also a fan of the new ship designer and simultaneous planning, sequential execution design of multiplayer is fucking Alan Turing brilliant but it would be nice to clean up the rest of it in a few months. Maybe that is just what I need to do.
First off I'd ask that you please remove profanities from your post. Second SimCity 2013 doesn't compare. SimCity 2013 was poorly handled from the beginning with lies coming from the designers about online only and why it's needed as well as the fact that cities couldn't be bigger. They had poor design forcing traffic bottlenecks and poor planning.
Galactic Civilizations III the designers have always been upfront about everything and don't have any huge bottleneck issues nor is the game unplayable.
Thank you for your response.
I don't doubt that GalCiv II was more painful but since you agreed with the point(s) made in my previous post I'm sure you can see how people might not care. So many bug-fixes so soon doesn't sit well with anyone other than the hard-core fan (who by the nature of being such is likely to excuse pretty much anything anyway). Fully-cooked products don't (shouldn't) require a slew of patches/fixes within the first few weeks to make things even playable for some and sure your continued post-sale support is not to be doubted, only your ability to set yourself apart from the rest when it comes to releasing a finished (or at least what can be reasonably seen as 'finished' these days) product is being put under the spotlight in the (honest) reviews and/or posts I've been reading and game experiences I've been hearing about from friends etc.
The PC is great because of the vast range of customization possible (hardware and software - wise). The thing that is horrible about the PC is... the same thing. With any complex software release you aren't going to see a lot of the game breaking problems (crashes, etc.) until you get a lot of people using it. 100,000 user = 100,000 different computers. PC development is not for the faint of heart.
Which is why EA for something like GC3 is a good idea; get as many hard core testers helping as you can. But it still is dwarfed by the release crowd. So the argument to just wait until it is perfectly stable is an impossible request. The developer has to bite it and respond as best they can. The difference between good and so-so or bad companies is not whether users will have problems with their software on release, it's how dedicated they are to addressing it. As has been said, some are good at this, some not so good. Stardock is in the top 10%. I say that after gaming for 45 years, but it's just my 3c. (I notice that inflation has affected other things.)
The problem is that our review community, professional and amateur, as far as I see for the most part don't get it.
The crashes I experience have NOTHING to do with performance and seem to be triggered by errors of different sources, usually during loading.
The game isn't crash happy for everyone, odds are there is something you could do to clean them up. It's probably going to be something simple, like an anti-virus running, or a bad graphics driver.
Getting uncomfortably close to the 70% mark on steam though if you ask me :/
I also think the game needed a bit more time in the oven. I don't have any experience running a game studio, but I do know my own expectations. I couldn't care less about what is missing from GalCiv 2. What is more concerning is the lack of attention to basic gameplay balance. The fact that major balance changes (1.02) are being made just a few weeks after release speaks for itself - and there is still a long way to go. In addition, I think there are is a lack of significant innovations over the GalCiv 2 format. For example, there could have been more effort to reduce micro. Stardock could have implemented a new system to make constructors less time consuming, or implement smarter, more customizable governors. I really see nothing new for the 4X genre in this game as it stands. The only thing that I find a significant improvement is starbases, but their usefulness is limited due to the 1 ship/turn limit. I have no problem that the game does not have all the features of GalCiv 2, but there are not many significant changes, and the gameplay lacks depth due to poor balancing. Personally, I will be more cautious about buying Stardock products in the future. I already avoided the GalCiv 3 beta due to my experience with Elemental, so this is a bit of second strike for me. Although the game is no where near as bad as Elemental, I didn't get much mileage out of it as a GalCiv 2 vet. Of course, if this is a successful strategy for Stardock, I do not expect them to change anything just to cater towards me, or other forum goers. Ultimately, we are a small minority. I will be back in a month or two to see how the game shapes up with post-release support.
yada yada, blah blah blah. But on a serious note, why is this in modding?
The correct answer is it isn't I was just having a ... moment...
@abomination5. I also agreee with the things you mentioned.And would like to elaborate some parts.
+1. Stardock is harvesting a lot of ingame date atm.It should be clear that with increasing amount of planetsand galaxy size the major portion of gameplay shifts toward micromanaging, away fromconquering the galaxy.
They have auto- expolore + survey, which is fire and forget. But for managing planets, fleets, starbases these feature is not implemented (yet).I mean these issue should have been clear when first alpha tester playedbigger maps. You handled it in GC 2 why couldn't you in CG3?You have the necessary code already written just copy it into GC 3 folder ^^ ( and yes I know that I do not know anything about game development).
And this is a serios limiter for me personally. I don't play maps > largebecause I know that 80 % of the time I will just micro-manage things.That's not fun at all.And of course I will compare it to GC II, as I played that game as well.
+1, After playing endless legend I noticed that there was no only 1/thing per turn limiter. After building a new city I just bought every improvent I needed and the whole thing was up to date. Then just clicking on auto - govern and I can focus on crushingthe next city - micromanagemt effectively handled.
Needed 10 Troops for next turn, sure if you have enough cash torush it, no problem. (EL vs. GC III).
As Elemental was released it got pretty bad reviews overall. About 40% I believe. At that time I didn't get it because of this. After some time they redesigned it and it got to Fallen Enchantress. They worked onmany flaws that game had. And now I have it on my steam account.
They were at 81%. They were in the high 60s until Beta 5.
Now however, in the two weeks or so after they have fallen to 74% (last time I checked). That's why in my other post I asked what can Stardock do to change your mind to positive? A lot of the negative reviews I've read are crashing or AI related, so once those issues are resolved change your review to positive. The bad thing is most of those won't change it even if they end up loving the game.
The ball is in Stardock's court really.
(1) The game needs to perform better on low end hardware
(2) The game needs to be stable across a wider range of systems
(3) The game needs to evolve more of the kind of refinment players are looking for
Those 3 things should take care of much of it. Civilization V, today, has a >90% steam review score.
We didn't release so many updates because we felt compelled to. Every game we've released has had rapid post-release updates as you may recall. It has nothing to do with the game being "finished" or not but rather more a case of Stardock being small enough to be able to put out rapid updates.
As 4X games go, GalCiv III 1.0 was as stable as any other recently released 1.0 4X in recent years. That isn't necessarily an endorsement of the state of game development these days but a reality of having to make a PC game.
As a practical matter, Beta 5 could have been released as a 1.0. Forum feedback can be useful but it is not anywhere close to a reflection of the average player.
If you read forums, you would think that the average player is running a low end PC on insane maps against crazy high AI players and finding the game too easy and incredibly buggy.
But what people don't realize is that these days, games come with metrics. We know how many people start a game, what % of them quit normally (as opposed to it crashing), what types of maps they're playing, what difficulties they're playing at, what hardware they're using. And we're not talking about "finished" games, we're merely talking about game starts and process loads.
Virtually everyone (4 out of 5 players) play at normal or below difficulty. They play small maps (less than 1% play the insane map). There are actually more people starting multplayer games than there are people starting maps on insane size. Only a tiny tiny percentage of players start games with the difficulty >challenging. And only a small percentage of games are started that don't exist with a WM_QUIT (i.e. normal exit).
Those are the facts. And reviewers tend to be people very familiar with this kind of thing. They know that forum feedback is largely worthless to gauge the mood of players.
And then there's the reviews. We also can track the impressions to a page, the conversions from an impression to a sale, etc. Do you know the difference between an 81% and a 74% steam user score? Nothing. Do you know the difference between the first several helpful reviews being negative and the first several being positive? Nothing.
I can tell you that a Steam user score that goes below 70% (where it becomes "mixed") does make a big deal. You fall below 70% and the game's dead. And GalCiv III is at 73% (and was at 74% last week so the trend is negative).
Anyway, the point is, I'm not sure what else we can do at this point that we're not already doing. If the game does fall below 70% then it'll be in real trouble. Hopefully people reading this thread have reviewed the game (positive or negative) and if negative will consider updating their review.
Sorry, I was remembering wrong, sorry thinking positive
I wish it was that though.
I am a cynical guy so it would be out of character for me to come to the defense of professional reviewers , but it is entirely in character for me to declare that most of the egotistical, self appointed guru gamers are also full of shit even more. Most are just venting about personal experience that has zero to do with producing and marketing a PC game.
First off I'd ask that you please remove profanities from your post. Second SimCity 2013 doesn't compare. SimCity 2013 was poorly handled from the beginning with lies coming from the designers about online only and why it's needed as well as the fact that cities couldn't be bigger. They had poor design forcing traffic bottlenecks and poor planning.Galactic Civilizations III the designers have always been upfront about everything and don't have any huge bottleneck issues nor is the game unplayable.
Simcity 2013 had dozens of positive reviews, and dozens of awards won, at release, on the state of the game on release. I says the idea of it being reviewed largely is the exact same concept. False reviewing. There are differences between quality execution and release schedules with finished products and those that aren't and a difference between legit reviewing and those reviews which are also not legit.
There are issues here. The game is not unplayable as it was with Simcity due to their design and execution but there are issues. For a game 3rd in the series, some of these issues should not be here.
The problem with many game reviewers is they never really get into the game, which was SimCity 2013's major flaw. The game wasn't noticed as broken because if you only play the game for 30-60-120 minutes it played fairly well. (Even with EA's beta process limiting server load and 30 minute play times.) This caused many people not to see the major flaws until after release and noticing most players actually play the game for several hours at a sitting instead of 30 minutes at a time.
Some of this is the same issues with Galactic Civilizations III, most of the issues are popping up in games that are taking many hours, in some cases 40+ hours of game play. The fact of the matter is reviewers and internal QA doesn't have the time to sit down and play a full game of this scope so they don't catch all these. Then when players do report them, it's to late as a new patch is out and their current game is outdated so they say it was fixed start over with new patch.
The good thing as said before is Galactic Civilizations III issues are mostly minor and relatively easy fixes, without changing the whole concept of the game. These issues will be fixed and the reviews will be dead on at that time. Now on the other hand if we're still having these discussions a year from now, then you can tell me I told you so. SimCity 2013 was broken, they couldn't fix it without completely changing the game which EA wasn't willing to budget for, and unfortunately SimCity is now dead along with Maxis. The good thing with that is it opened the door for many other City Builder games out there to show EA what they did horribly wrong.
As 4X games go, GalCiv III 1.0 was as stable as any other recently released 1.0 4X in recent years. That isn't necessarily an endorsement of the state of game development these days but a reality of having to make a PC game. As a practical matter, Beta 5 could have been released as a 1.0. Forum feedback can be useful but it is not anywhere close to a reflection of the average player.If you read forums, you would think that the average player is running a low end PC on insane maps against crazy high AI players and finding the game too easy and incredibly buggy.But what people don't realize is that these days, games come with metrics. We know how many people start a game, what % of them quit normally (as opposed to it crashing), what types of maps they're playing, what difficulties they're playing at, what hardware they're using. And we're not talking about "finished" games, we're merely talking about game starts and process loads.Virtually everyone (4 out of 5 players) play at normal or below difficulty. They play small maps (less than 1% play the insane map). There are actually more people starting multplayer games than there are people starting maps on insane size. Only a tiny tiny percentage of players start games with the difficulty >challenging. And only a small percentage of games are started that don't exist with a WM_QUIT (i.e. normal exit).Those are the facts. And reviewers tend to be people very familiar with this kind of thing. They know that forum feedback is largely worthless to gauge the mood of players.And then there's the reviews. We also can track the impressions to a page, the conversions from an impression to a sale, etc. Do you know the difference between an 81% and a 74% steam user score? Nothing. Do you know the difference between the first several helpful reviews being negative and the first several being positive? Nothing. I can tell you that a Steam user score that goes below 70% (where it becomes "mixed") does make a big deal. You fall below 70% and the game's dead. And GalCiv III is at 73% (and was at 74% last week so the trend is negative). Anyway, the point is, I'm not sure what else we can do at this point that we're not already doing. If the game does fall below 70% then it'll be in real trouble. Hopefully people reading this thread have reviewed the game (positive or negative) and if negative will consider updating their review.
Do you have any stats for how many turns the average game is that you are willing to share? or how much time they take? Real curious about that.
Simcity has a 64 metacritic. While I'm sure there are people,who trust user reviews, I doubt they're in the majority. Too often user reviews are basically people unleashing their baggage on everyone. The steam reviews are the best user review system out there but most people still refer to the professionals.
Based on our metrics and research two things matter: >80 metacritic and >=mostly positive steam reviews.
If I had used user reviews, I would have passed on Civilization V, Starcraft 2, and Diablo 3 (to name just a few examples of the quality of early player reviews).
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