Civ3 Interview: JEFF MORRIS

[Ming]

See... there is a real reason to be optimisic. CivIII will be worth the money.... sign me up. And thanks for interview Jeff.
Some of CivIII's hardest critics post here... and they haven't even seen the game yet

Keep on Civin'

[SerapisIV]

Originally posted by Ming
See... there is a real reason to be optimisic. CivIII will be worth the money.... sign me up. And thanks for interview Jeff.
Some of CivIII's hardest critics post here... and they haven't even seen the game yet

Keep on Civin'

You're damn right hardest critics. I sure as hell ain't buying a Civ game if I don't see Elvis on my computer screen when I start up my first game.

No Elvis, No Civ3 !!!

j/k

[Locutus]

I for one am not worried about minor issues and bugs that can be fixed in patches. Need for patching is annoying but inevitable in the modern gaming industry. I'm not so much worried about lack of testing (though that would be bad) but much more about the 'big issues', things that can't be fixed in a patch: graphics, interface, AI, military system, absence of pw-system, government system, stuff like that. In other words, Civ3 really only being Civ2.5 (or less)...

[Jeje2]

Some clarifications needed from me apereantly...

First, right now I don't recall crying for a public beta?
What I have wanted is a similiar thing that SMAC had. (And a possibility to apply to it)

IMO it's not the beta.times responsibility to test it on n-systems. That's what the publishing house will do.

What IMHO the beta time is to do is:

• Give fresh feedback to the time. Most of FIRAXIS people have worked on this for a long time already. I'm sorry but you get blind to your own work and just a fact. So beta-time comes along and sees the final product, they aren't blinded by a long process. They do have opinions on how to improve the game.
• Try to crash it by playing different possibilities. No matter what Infogrames tests, the best test is pure playing. Sure SMAC can have given good hints into what to look for, but replaizing a human???
• Try to find illogicallities from the AI.
• Do playbalanzing.

OK, thats some things I could come up with right now. (There are more)

So I do think that Civ3 needs a beta-testing. Let it be closed or whatever, but before release Civ3 needs an outside group to playtest it.

Was the closed betatesting mentioned in the inteview?
If it was I missed it or then it was wirtten between the lines.
So?

FIRAXIS: Please, oh please let an outside group test it before release.


And yes I'm too glad that we got replys to questions - I just didn't like what we got. Let's just pray everything will go right in the end.

---

P.S. Someone should ask Sid how he really feels working an a sequel for first time in his lifetime. (The other sequels weren't his work.) Does he like? Any opinions? If he can choose between a sequel or a grand new thing after golf and Civ3 are made, what shall he choose? etc.

[korn469]

Apolyton: Will there be 7 civs in a game like civ2 and smac or more? We have heard almost any possible choice on this

Jeff Morris: Supported, there will be 7 civilizations in a game, 8 including the player. The editor allows you to adjust this, though many screens are setup only for this 8 civ limit.
(sidenote: when asked what the limit of the editor will be, Jeff responded that the tools are still in development and that the current limit is 16)

well is it just me or...

Firaxis redesign the screens so the game supports more than 7 civs!!! it take take effort but it would be worth it! and really how many screen would need to be redesigned?

i repect Jeff for one thing and that is he is always honest, and he never candycoats the truth...even when i don't agree with him

[SerapisIV]

Originally posted by Locutus
I'm not so much worried about lack of testing (though that would be bad) but much more about the 'big issues', things that can't be fixed in a patch: graphics, interface, AI, military system, absence of pw-system, government system, stuff like that. In other words, Civ3 really only being Civ2.5 (or less)...

AI was patched often in SMAC. The PW-system lost to a regular system on Apolyton 65%-35% two months ago. Graphics have always been modded, why can't they be patched?

The only thing that can't be patched is the basic game engine, you're stuck with that from the getgo, but apparently from Jeff's interview, they've been using the same basic engine (heavily modified) for a while now.

Listening to Jeff talk of their JACKAL system, I wonder if that's a limiting factor in getting truly innovative versus just iterative gameplay.

[LaRusso]

the interview is fine. we asked for info, we got some.
it's their company, their release, their make it or break it. whoever does not like it can really start reading books, watching tv or playing other games. alternatively, design an altciv. i am really a bit tired of people bashing firaxis. i will buy a game no matter what. if its buggy, they will patch it. there is no perfect game. we beta tested EU for several months and it still needed a couple of patches afterwards. if i waste the money, the whole franchise has given me so much fun over the years that i simply cannot hold any grudge.
there are so many games out there, people. if you do not like the way this one is shaping, buy another!
cheers!

[kittenOFchaos]

Well...I see that Yin the smeghead got posting early and has flavoured this thread with dismay!


Personnally I am pleased about the news given (limited as it is) especially as it is FAR TOO SOON to start hyping it up!

As a believer in putting the work in hours before a deadline I´m sure civ3 will be more than a civ2 2.5...the new features as outlined clearly in civfanatics.com look wonderful.


As for the no.of civs at the same time...8 as standard as so far 16 with the editor is for a darn good reason:

The more civs you have the more rapid tech advance is...thus 16 civs without a sensible alterative to the rate the tech advances will lead to modern techs VERY early along the timeline. Balancing such a tech paradigm for every number of civs combinations is very time consuming to get right.

With the experience they have of 7 civs and under in civ, civ2 and smac at the same time they can get the tech to advance roughly in time with history AND they have some greater idea of the resulting interactions between that number of civs.


Personnally I will want to see the graphics souped up and certainly no-more glitches with roads and mountains BUT otherwise I´m sure our hopes will be realised NEARER THE TIME.


As for korean gits like YIN, get fooked, just cos your civ ain´t in the game

[Sabre2th]

Originally posted by korn469


well is it just me or...

Firaxis redesign the screens so the game supports more than 7 civs!!! it take take effort but it would be worth it! and really how many screen would need to be redesigned?

The number of civs in the game at a time is directly related to computing power. Only faster computers will be able to support 16 civs at once. I believe this is why they left it out of the screens. It allows them to keep the system requirements lower.

How much do you want to bet the AI players won't be using aircraft carriers? Hope the AI knows what to do with resources (anyone else get the bad feeling resources will only limit the human players? - we'll never see an AI colony and such). Sorry to be such a pessimist guys but it seems to me that if gameplay has been enhanced, the AI would be the first thing the firaxis guys touted! The more complex diplomacy really gives me the willies though - anyone else recall pre-DaleDiplomod CTP2? Options look pretty but the AI always rejects . . .

For the most part though, I like the graphics and I like the idea that some tasks require resourses that may not fall within borders. Even civ-specific units and bonuses sound good (and can be turned off or modded out). Will wait wait for its release and more information before I decide whether to buy it or wait for the price to go down (sorry Firaxis, but after the actions of another software company known as Activision . . .).

[Grumbold]

Originally posted by Sabre2th
The number of civs in the game at a time is directly related to computing power. Only faster computers will be able to support 16 civs at once. I believe this is why they left it out of the screens. It allows them to keep the system requirements lower.

Computing power may be a perfectly good reason not to offer 16 civs in the default game, but hardly a good reason to design screens that are completely incapable of rescaling to handle them.

[H Tower]

on the positive side, their still in alpha so maybe they'll add more. plus, they're working on overlay tiles (poles and mines), maybe that means they're still going to fix those damn roads!

other than that...

[MarkG]

the basic thing is that 16(more than 8 anyway) IS achievable by the game engine.

beyond that, the issue remains in three things

1) will it get too slow with more civs(that is also related to the player's machine)
2) will the game have bugs with more civs
3) how serious will the limitations in the modification tools be

now for #1, it depends on the coding of the engine and we dont know anything about it

for #2, it will be up to how much time, resources and willingness firaxis will have to kill bugs they really dont have to kill, since the supported number is 8

as for #3, firaxis keeps mentioning them, and Jeff talked continued after-release improvement on the tools, so things are looking good


what would be a great indication that more than 8 civs is actually something possible, is if Firaxis announced that one of the included scenarios will have more than 8 civs....

[MarkG]

Originally posted by Jeje2
Was the closed betatesting mentioned in the inteview?

quote from the interview

A closed public beta wasn't an option since don't they involve a large enough 'sample' for compatibility testing and requires immense manpower to manage.

i dont know how the smac closed beta went, but i watched a similar effort for ctp2 closely and it partially failed. good stuff came out of it(a few suggestions made it into the game, a bmp-to-ctp2 map converter was created and released, and perhaps most importantly some of the mod creators knew the game very well by the time it was released so new mods came out quickly) but there werent big dramatic changes....

[Grumbold]

I was under the impression CtP2 suffered from being rushed to market and was known to be flawed on release. The closed beta might have delivered more if the timescales had been more flexible.

[Robert Plomp]

I think it's a great interview with some good new info !

1. Jeff saying that the graphics are about 'done' doesn't mean that the 'roads over the mountains' graphics are the final ones ! Pherhaps those were alpha graphics. In fact I'm even concidering everyone that even wondered if those graphics were the final ones to be completely crazy.

2. The 'public beta' thing is really a hype. Who knows if Civ2 or civ got a public beta ? Indeed, they didn't since there was no internet. The point is that internet makes all gamers aware of the possibility to get their hands on the game earlier. Pherhaps the game will be slightly buggy at it's release, well, so be it. Then it'll be patched. (good thing about internet)

If it won't be patched............ then it won't be. so what ?
The darkest scenario is that I wasted $50....... so what ?
$250 for 10 years of great civ experience ?

3. I'm slightly dissapointed about 8 to be the standard number of civs, but it's great that 16 is the optional limit.

I'm looking forwards to the rest of the interviews.
When can we expect them, Administrators ?
Or are you going to be mysterious about 'release dates' as well

[korn469]

MarkG you also forgot another reason

4. more than 7 civs supported in a game...most important feature of the civ3 expansion

they should make it possible to handle more than 7 civs in the default settings but if not then i guess i will wait till the expansion for this feature

kittenOFchaos

The more civs you have the more rapid tech advance is...thus 16 civs without a sensible alterative to the rate the tech advances will lead to modern techs VERY early along the timeline. Balancing such a tech paradigm for every number of civs combinations is very time consuming to get right.

With the experience they have of 7 civs and under in civ, civ2 and smac at the same time they can get the tech to advance roughly in time with history AND they have some greater idea of the resulting interactions between that number of civs.

for one thing adding more civs into the game wouldn't have to upset the rate of tech advance, each additional civ you add to the game could increase the cost for each tech until tech discover rates were about the same no matter how many civs you had...in civ2 you never got tech advances at roughly around the same time in history...i think on a fairly recent poll a rather high precentage of civers had colonized alpha centauri before 1000A.D.

we need more civs in the default game people...if firaxis implemented 16 civs in a game, you wouldn't have to always play with 16 civs, you could play with less...but if firaxis doesn't implement this feature you cannot play with more civs (without serious frustrations from not being able to contact other civs in the diplomacy menu etc.)

[Locutus]

Serapis,
If the AI really s*cks, a simple patch can't fix it. I didn't play SMAC enough to be able to judge it's AI so I can't say to what degree this patching was actually effective.
Many people who voted for the settler-system never even bothered to try the PW-system so I don't find that poll very reliable. But even if it is representative, the fact that others are satisfied with Civ2.5 or lower doesn't mean I have to be. Graphics can be tweaked in a patch, not radically improved (do you know what the cost is of completely redesigning the graphics? not something you want to do without charging money for it).

There will be many things in Civ3 that I probably won't like and that will never get patched because Firaxis choose for a certain approach and I quite frankly think that their approach ('conservative sequel') is all wrong.

Markos,
Yeah, 16 civs is achievable, which is basicly good, but if half the screens are too small then it won't be very enjoyable. Surely you experienced this yourself with CtP1? But my hope here is that Firaxis (contrary to Activision) will be willing to fix problems that are reported with this in patches, so I'm not too worried here. (Still, 16 isn't much, CtP has 32 civs and that while Civ3 is supposed to be the best Civ game ever, Firaxis and others have been claiming that for quite some time now...)

You know very well why the closed beta failed for CtP2. Upper management was against the whole thing from the start and Grumbold hit the nail on its head with his comments about the timescales. In the very short period of time we had, we made tons of good suggestions and only a very small number of them (all quickly implementable) were actually implemented. Should Firaxis have done it, there would probably have been more room and less resistance, thus creating much better results.

[Imran Siddiqui]

I think I can rely on Yin to uphold the pessimists view and quietly slide off to spend time on the Arcanum and Morrowind websites. Neither of them are going to be the best strategy game ever

That's because they are both RPGs...

I like the interview (I helped with the questions may have something to do with it).

REAL interested in a true Civ3, which Firaxis shall deliver to us.

[TCO]

Originally posted by Nemo
Hey, I was K-Lined from dalnet again.
Mark, next time, can you p-l-e-a-s-e put the IRC on another server?

iol, IOL!

[St Leo]

Isn't there a round diplomatic relationships screen in the game? That's probably the thing that's not scaling.

[Zanzin]

Crap! I don't know what to believe anymore! Yins diehard pessimism still rings in my head...but Firaxis and Sid are the tried and true masters of the civ genre.

Even if the graphics are crud, I remember how much I loved civ2 and how much I yearn to play something like it again (I gave my copy to a brother now in Queensland after playing the game nonstop for 2 years)...

...so maybe civ3 won't be all bad.

P.S. Yin, is being optimistic against our clubs charter?

[yin26]

As I've always said, our job is to be watchdogs to HELP Civ3. If certain things deserve praise and optimism, by all means express it! Just don't forget the big picture, since one element alone won't make the game great, but one element alone COULD ruin it.

I'm, very dismayed

Jeff used the word "conservative." To me, that puts a very big label on the game: Civ 2.? It's not Civ 3, no matter how they may now try to ice the cake, we know what their intentions were. They decided against a truly new Civ. The difference between Civ (1) and Civ 2 is very apparent, and no one would argue that it wasn't a marvelous "next step." Civ 3 was supposed to be another step, but with a "conservative" approach, how can it be? Would anyone say that the differences between the original Civ and Civ 2 were made with a "conservative" approach? I didn't think so.

I will wait until the price drops dramatically before I'll consider buying the game, maybe even at a yard sale(where I did in fact buy CTP2 )!

Thanks for your honesty Jeff, but I'm sure that someone's(Company exec's) not going to like that you've used the word "conservative" when describing the approach to designing the "next step" in the Civ series!

Maybe Civ 4 will be the real deal. Funny, you'd call it Civ 4, but we'd all know that it was Civ 3

Signed,
Once a fan of the Civilization series.

[MarkG]

Originally posted by Locutus
Markos,
Yeah, 16 civs is achievable, which is basicly good, but if half the screens are too small then it won't be very enjoyable. Surely you experienced this yourself with CtP1?

yes, of course. that's what i said too. it's a good things that the engine CAN handle 16 civs, but there are three questions that remain to be answered. the answers to the questions will show if we end up being able to have more than 8 civs or not...

You know very well why the closed beta failed for CtP2. Upper management was against the whole thing from the start and Grumbold hit the nail on its head with his comments about the timescales.

i didnt say it was the team's fault! starting from puting the team into the game too late and ending to the.... amazing situation with the builds it was all about the managment of the effort.

Should Firaxis have done it, there would probably have been more room and less resistance, thus creating much better results.

probably, but we dont really know what kind of resources firaxis has....

[marcuspeddle]

I don't mind not having more than 7 other civilisations in the game but I hope I can't predict how each country will act simply by looking at their colour. In Civ2 the blue were always aggressive and in CTP2 the purples were always aggressive and placed next to me.
I feel confident that Firaxis will put out a quality product in October or whenever. Civ2 and SMAC were great games despite their flaws (which were minor) and I don't see any reason why Civ3 should be inferior. The diplomacy and AI in SMAC were a dream compared to Civ2 so I expect they will be even better in Civ3. The screenshot that Yin posted was very ugly but in later screenshots I could see that they were improved. Jeff Morris said in the interview that they are still polishing them up so when the game is released I think they should be very nice. I feel optimistic about Civ3 (but I'm not joining any club ).

[Robert Plomp]

Markos, you didn't answer my "when will the next interview be released" question.............

About the 'conservative' thingy.........
After all what I have read so far about civ3 it is going to be a bigger step forward then civ 2 was ! Civ2 didn't really put new game concepts in the game. It was only more of the same, and some concept were improved. (combat model ie.)

Civ3 has already:
- culture
- resources / trade
- diplomacy

3 concepts that are new or very much improved.
Only these 3 concepts make the game already a huge leap forwards. The civ2.5 (now it's even a civ 2.?) debate really makes no sence at all !

And again about the grahpics, if YOU do really believe that those "road over the mountain" graphics are the final graphics and not alpha graphics.............

[kolpo]

Where is the good time when they still worked for micropose and never produced something else then a genial game(civ, col, civ2), loved by all fans, magazine preview/review. This time is now defenitly over with Firaxis I think. Civ3 won't be a bad game just like SMAC(civ3 uses polished SMAC engine) was quite good. But civ1 played I for 2 years, civ2 for 3, col for 1.5 but SMAC only for 3 months that's the differnce between a good game and a genius game. And i think civ3 will just be good not genius.

[OneFootInTheGrave]

I am generally satyisfied, first of all bacause it is possible to have more than 7 civs and I have faith in Firaxis that they will support the game as bugs are disovered and that some missing features will be added if there is a public outcry for them after the game is released. (I think that Jeff hinted that)

My only minor concern is the graphics, as it stands i prefer CTP II ones . Well civ colors are . (are the French still pink? this should be a question in the next inteview, and does Mr. Bonnell know about it )

But this is a minor issue if the game plays well.

I am only suprised that Sid is hailing graphics as the best in this genre... I think many of the fans disagree, except if the screenshots take away some mystical quality of the graphical engine and the game looks much better on screen while playing?

[Harlan]

I've been on the road for a while - this interview is kind of a rude hello to come back to.

What does "many screens are setup only for the 8 civ limit" mean, exactly? If it means you can't see the info for up to 16 civs at one time, but have to scroll a scroll bar, that's not so bad, IMHO. But if it means that you can't access certain data for any civ after the 8th one on certain screens, that's really bad. Please say it ain't so!

If it is the case, what a painful reminder of the CTP1 that is. There were never any scenarios made with CTP1 because of several key omissions to the game that made scenario making virtually impossible. One of these was a science screen that crashed if you opened it when playing with more than 8 civs. Please tell me this kind of thing (half-hearted "try at your own risk" support for anything beyond the official civ limit) won't happen again!

Scenarios are what allowed Civ2 to last so long. If it weren't for scenarios, nobody would have bought all those expansion packs, and there wouldn't be a market after all these years to even make a Civ3. And having a de-facto 7 civ limit for scenarios by adopting an "add more civs at your own risk" policy after all these years is just silly.

My other thought is on beta testing. It seems that the game is being rushed out too fast, if there's no time for a public beta of any kind. What's the big rush, anyways? Trying to get something out by Christmas, I can understand, but what's so special about October? Why not wait another month, have more testing, and come out with a really solid product? Wouldn't the better reviews and word of mouth that results help sales much more over the long term? I think the CTP series died mostly because they released their products before they were really ready. Look where it got Activision- they're nearing bankruptcy now, I hear.

The rush to get games out before they're really ready - I just don't get it. Why does the whole computer game industry fall victim to that mentality? Penny wise, pound foolish.