Quite curious, most of you already what I'm talking about... Civilisation III is a beta since it needs so much balancing. So much that modders are going here and there, changing things in about every single place we could balance something. In no time we'll have 10 different Civ III almost as official as Firaxis' one because of Firaxis' strange balancing. So, what's the problem? Maaaaybe Firaxis should have made a... official (I was going to say public) beta?
Well I have my personal opinion on this... If Firaxis had made one, well the game would have come out maybe 2 months later, which is little late to be well known at Chrismas.
So they had the following choice:
1- By releasing the game early, gamers would be able to play right away, even if it's not reasy, permitting a very huge beta covering the entire game where ideas would come out of it.
2- Waiting the game to have what they intended, with no major balance issue, but with the problem of less cash coming in for marketing reasons: didn't came out at the good time.
What is the difference between 1 and 2 if the FINAL (I mean balanced) game is in our computer? Well not alot of things. The only little buggy thing is that it is very dependant on the patches. Like these nice video cards and other hardware that are soooo great but particularly bad without patches. Promises, promises from their marketting, but nothing is ever done. So I personnally think we can have some confiance into Firaxis to put that thing okay, but I would see it as dangerous if it was something common. The weak bridge to make consumer buy is the weak bridge promissing it will be okay. And in hardware world, the bridge is in many cases broken. If anyone knows Ultima IX, you see the extreme case of a winning title since the beginning of gaming with enough never patched problems to not even work correctly on most computer.
I made that thread since so much people were talking about it here and there, and because I don't see it as a damnation, but Firaxis SHOULD HAVE INFORMED THE FANS OF SOME IRREGULARITIES.
Or maybe I'm wrong all along and they didn't see them?...
Perhaps you are new around these parts, but there actually was no public beta, but thankfully they didn't need it as they got out a polished, virtually bug-free product.
