Thanks for the heads up. Pre-order cancelled.
The much-awaited X3 seems to be having major problems too. Publisher forcing developers to release code with major, major problems. These particular developers, Egosoft, always patch and patch until things are fixed though.
Why do they do it? Surely the sales they lose in bad publicity just aren’t worth it?
Wow. I’m not really a big computer gamer, but I’ve been chomping at the bit to rush out and buy this game. This is really, really, really disappointing news. :mad:
My $0.02:
I’m trying to decide just how much I can say about how… how amusing it was to work with ATI’s driver manufacturers.
Suffice it to say that I have the feeling this is not entirely Firaxis’s fault. Keep in mind that developers, quality assurance, and publishers often have to work at cross purposes. The developers want the game to do everything imaginable, including make your coffee, and they want it to be pretty. The QA department wants it to work, and sometimes that just takes TIME. The publishers want the game to come out on a handy date, rather like releasing movies. One super nice release time is a couple weeks before E3, for example. Not only are there going to be thousands of people congratulating the devs and publishers at their booth, but it’s just before summer starts. Just before Christmas is obviously also a good time.
Now, in a perfect world, the developers and the QA department and the publishers are all in one building. The world is rarely perfect enough for the QA lead to go bang on the head developer’s door and ask why, pray tell, they haven’t fixed a showstopping bug and what they’re doing working on all that high level content. You can’t hang up on an irate techie. 
But in no world conceived can everyone including the developers for the video card and sound card drivers be in the same building with the game developers. It’s been known to happen that, during a game’s development and testing, the brand-newest driver from (to pick a company COMPLETELY at random. Really.) ATI suddenly makes the computer explode into so much rainbow confetti. It’s not that QA and the developers suddenly changed something or that they didn’t know that people used ATI cards.
I have the feeling – just the feeling, mind you; I don’t work for Firaxis and am not currently in the gaming industry – that the exchange went something like this:
QA Lead: frantically runs up to developer Sir! The new ATI driver is causing our game to launch computers into orbit!
Dev: Crap. We launch in a MONTH. We’re done with the game, bar testing, and they’re throwing new stuff at us? They have our specs, they have our game, why did they release a driver that doesn’t work with it?
QA Lead: Possibly because they hate us. But good news! I called them and they promised to have the new driver out by game launch.
Dev: Can we rely on that?
QA Lead: Well, do we have a choice? It’ll probably take them a month and a half to come out with a new driver; it’s not like they can just put a line of code in there that says WorkWithCiv4=TRUE.
Dev: Maybe we can delay launch for a –
Publisher: Don’t make me come down there and hit you with my stick with nails in. We are NOT pushing back the launch date any further.
QA Lead: Well, if we’re really lucky, maybe they’ll have it fixed when they say they will. Considering we’re two weeks from stamping this sucker on CDs and I already have this long list of bugs to find, I just can’t add this to the list. I put my faith in your hands, o ATI!
exeunt omnes, curtain
YOMAK (You owe me a keyboard). Also: if I have an nVidia card, can I still use this feature of the ATI drivers? Will my upstairs neighbors mind?
ATI’s driver releases are the reason I switched to nVidia.
Ditto. That and my ATI video card didn’t work so comfortably with my VIA chipset motherboard, occasionally just restarting the computer.
Of course, that still happens with my nVidia card… I suppose this is the implicit problem in making your own computer. 
I’m having a great time playing my new AOE III.
I’m still working my way through Dragonshard (The D&D RTS). Then I have the Rome:Total War expansion, then AoE3…by the time I’m ready to pick up Civ4, they’ll likely have patches out.
What was wrong with MoO III? It worked just fine. The only problem was that the game sucked.
This is why I usually wait before getting any game. I’m desperate enough to pick up almost any RPG out of the box, but I try to stay back from everything else.
I am fuming for all of you. I’m gonna pick up the game this weekend and hope the self-serving bias serves me well–I have an ATI card too. I don’t think any release could be as disastrous as Anarchy Online or anything released by Atari, but this sucks.
That wasn’t the only problem at all.
First off, there was a manual which told you virtually nothing about the game. The game itself had many facets which were simply impenetrable. Do you want to colonize the planet with “Ancient Battle Damage” or “Alien Artifacts”? Who knows, it’s not explained anywhere what they actually are! Well, it’d be nice if somewhere in the manual or the in-game encyclopedia things like that were explained.
But yes, the game also sucked powerfully though I still consider its main flaw the fact that some of the most important facets of the game simply were totally unexplained.
/me adds ATI card to Christmas list
I still blame Take Two more than Firaxis. Civ was originally going to ship in late November but Take Two moved the date forward since they’re having 28 million dollar cashflow situation.
Wouldn’t surprise me too terribly much. See, they don’t HAVE to worry about people not, say, keeping their subscription. When you’ve bought and opened and installed/attempted to install the game, it’s going to be a BIOTCH and a half to return.
So, they might be thinking, everyone will buy it and then we will patch it when we have time. They won’t bother returning it if we promise it WILL work…
It’s dishonest but not technically illegal, methinks.
Can I hear an amen. That game sucked dog dicks. It is the reason I will never preorder a game. I wait to see how the games are received now or try the demo version first.
Whew…I guess I lucked out. I bought and installed Civ4 yesterday and initially had bad graphical problems. I have the latest Catalyst drivers and am using an ATI 9800 Pro). I turned off my anti-aliasing and afterwards haven’t had a glitch with it.
The problem seems to be relegated to ATI 9500 series, 9600 XT, 9550, and x800 XT AGP ones.
The x800XT AGP and 9600XT are two of the most popular cards for gamers out there.
No ETA on the fix either
I’ll admit it. I was seriously considering upgrading my aging PC (or buying a new one) to play this game. But now I won’t.
I won’t be playing this game for 6 months at least, since I have to wait for a Mac version to come out (or for Apple to release their x86 boxes). I suppose one nice thing about that is that most of the bugs will be ironed out by then and, given the extremely limited Mac hardware, it’s quite conceivable that the Mac release will be tested on every single default hardware configuration.
This is in fact why, nine times of ten (unless it’s a new Sims 2 expansion, eyeshift) I don’t buy a new game until it’s been out for a month at least. I can hear about all the problems and wait for 'em to get fixed.
Similarly, I suggest not even playing an MMOG on its first day of release or the first day a new patch/expansion goes live.
If you’re able to patch and log in before the masses overwhelm the patch servers, patch days can be some of the most profitable/fun days to play an MMO. Oftentimes they’ll implement a new bug in a patch that will allow you to defeat a monster that you normally couldn’t, or to gain experience at faster than normal rates. Or they might have a powerful item drop from a monster that wasn’t intended to do so. Unless it is a widespread problem, it’s hard for them to justify a rollback for a minor issue like this.
I consider these types of days to be make-ups for having to deal with all the detrimental bugs that prevent you from defeating encounters that you otherwise would be able to handle. As well as for the days that you can’t log in/experience unplayable lag due to server issues.
Hey, at least they didn’t cut out the entire end of the game and shove the entire climax of the story into a conversation with a bloody npc, just so they could make the ship date.
>.>
CURSE YOU LUCASARTS!
<.<
But i’m still getting KOTOR III. Damn you Lucasarts.