"Denial" isn't just a river in Egypt, you know.
So says the guy claiming the only reason Civ V has a 91% metacritic score is because it has Sid Meier on the box. Presumably the players are afraid of him too, since the metacritic user score is 81%.
Civilization V has plenty of issues. But real issues aren't getting discussed here; it just descends into a flame war. A few specific individuals who stopped playing Civ long ago seem to insist on turning every Civ thread into a Civ vs Elemental thread, as if Civ has to “lose” for Elemental to “win”. Naturally, many of the folk here are Civ players and this generates a disproportionately large negative attitude towards Elemental by those people and things get ugly. It's silly, but every game seems to have its religious group, who rarely make “Ideas” or “Suggestions” posts, but are ready to jump on anyone who criticises the game or makes suggestions on how it could improve by taking concepts from other successful games.
Anyway, on to Civ V, the problems are very different to what Elemental had due to their very different starting conditions. Civ V's technical issues have been par for the course with new releases. There's always compatibility issues and such, which affect some customers and those get patched pretty quickly. Considering Civ V's been topping Steam's stats for “users concurrently playing” quite regularly the last few days (which is quite significant, that a 4X game can outdo the usual FPS/RTS games in audience), I think most people are getting the game to run just fine. Performance between turns was an issue on release for Civ IV as well and Firaxis have a reputation for not getting performance right till after a few patches.
Elemental's technical problems were due to SD creating a whole new engine in house which is a mammoth task with today's hardware and software variety. But now they know what kind of QA effort is required to get HW compatibility right.
Those of us complaining about Civ V on Civfanatics though, have very different complaints. We are complaining because we think it doesn't improve on Civ IV. Gameplay wise, Civ V does what it's meant to do. It's solid and doesn't have game breaking bugs. According to the polls, it appears the majority of players on the forum like it better than Civ IV. This is the issue – many of us think it's not better than Civ IV. I feel it's 1 step forward, 3 steps backwards. It doesn't feel like a Civilization game any more – they've gone a very different route. Many features and mechanics have been “streamlined” as they call it because they were too complicated... and I thought it was complexity that made Civ what it was.
It seems many people didn't like the 100 turns dash at the start of Civ IV games, where on high difficulties, every decision you had to make every turn was was crucial - and if you get it wrong it may mean the losing the game. Incorrectly choosing whether to beeline for Iron Working or Archery first, or not figuring out the best time and place to found your second city could stunt your growth terminally. Only experience could tell you how to choose based on the map and surroundings. Then there was the constant decision making as your empire expands and the way the game changed as new technologies introduced new combat classes, civics, tile improvements, etc. Sure there was micromanagement, but on the whole you felt like you were running an empire.
The problem with Civ V is it doesn't have this feel any more. The starting game is far more relaxed and there is no mad rush for land. You're not really competing against a world that's trying to kill you at every turn; the game is a lot more relaxing and slow paced. Everything complex about Civ IV seems to be reduced to a few numbers now – numbers that tell you either “Something's wrong and here's how to fix it” or “Everything's fine, just keep hitting End Turn”. There's no real stress any more and critical decisions are few and far between.
For many of us, that critical decision making was what made the Civ series what it was. Now they've changed it and most of the fans on the forums seem to actually like it. This has raised quite an uproar from those of us who thought we were getting an improvement to Civ IV, not a whole different direction.
So this is how it is. The reviews scored the game high because Civ V succeeds in what it set out to achieve. If Civ IV didn't exist and Civ V was the sequel to Civ III, everyone would love it. It's a good game on it's own strength. But Civ IV and it's expansions took the game to far deeper levels of immersive gameplay and empire building. So many of us on the forums feel we've been shortchanged and hence all the negativity.
We don't know if Firaxis plan to keep the streamlined approach, or mean to add complexity back with DLCs and expansions. The silver lining is, much of the SDK, the scripting and a Visual Studio based IDE have already been released and the C++ shouldn't be too far away. Just like with Civ IV and the plethora of mods it produced, people will be tearing the game apart, improving the AI, adding more complexity and in general creating total conversion mods to make it more like how they feel a Civ game should be. If it's one thing Civfanataics is good for, it's generating huge lists of well thought out ideas, as well as modders and programmers who know what they're doing.
