<<edit>>
stupid me. I left the word “leave” out of the title, so I look like an idiot. Continuing the tradition of stupidity. Darn it. :(
We’re coming up on a month since Firaxis broke Civ 5 via a memory mismanagement issue wherein large games can’t be completed. Also you can’t even reload large save-games from within a Civ game either. Both issues were side effects of the last patch.
It’s a worrying situation as Firaxis was/is such a class development house, and they’ve fallen into a Twilight zone persona where they’re totally detached from the fact people have given up on their game for the time being. RIght now I can’t think of another PC game from the past 10 years that’s done this kind of thing to the player. In most other buggy PC games you can always find a way around an issue or mod it out - but that’s not the case with Civ V. We’re left to the whims of the developer and sadly they’ve decided we don’t need to finish play until they’re ready to release a mega-patch.
I wonder if Firaxis has moved so many development resources to Facebook that management has decided it doesn’t really matter how bad they’re alienating their core player-base? I don’t understand how they could have come to the decision that this is OK.
Not any kind of insider “in the know” here, but guessing the “decision,” as you refer to it, isn’t quite as simple as that.
For starters, another key stakeholder, 2K Games (the publisher, also known as “the company that has all the money”), presumably has its own stance and may be pushing or pulling in another direction.
If the millions of little Steam pop-ups I see every day (when someone on my friend’s list starts up a game) is any indication, then people have not given up on CivV by any stretch of the imagination.
Then Take2 needs to be taken to task if they’re the ones that made this decision for Firaxis. If this is the case I’ll write a letter to their board. Not that they’d give a crap, but if I post the same in other places that gives Take2 bad publicity then maybe they could be shamed into doing the right thing - giving Firaxis the manpower & funding they need.
Friend, you don’t know that. Most people here don’t, and the few who might will not divulge details in public for reasons that should hopefully be obvious.
Respectfully suggest that since this patch issue (frustrating though it might be) is out of your hands and out of your control, to either play on a different setting, or enjoy a completely different game that doesn’t suffer from similar problems in the meantime?
For instance, being a Civ player, have you tried some of the better mods for Civ 4, such as the recently talked up Fall From Heaven 2 or Dune Wars?
With Elemental if you load up a large game, you can actually finish it. Not so with Civ V post-patch. There’s a lot of excellent things to like about Civ V which is why it’s worth the effort to try and fix.
Considering that Take 2 laid off members of the Civ V team months before the game even came out should give you a sizeable clue about any notion that they’d put people onto the game after it came out.
Maybe it’s something really hard or complex to fix, that requires/required a lot of refactoring and they want to spend a lot of time testing it before putting out a patch that may break more things.
