Civilization 4: Beyond the Sword is out. Unfortunately, I’m traveling and was unable to get it yet. But a quick swing by Civfanatics shows that there of course has already been an initial patch to the game, because the shipped version was buggy and terrible.
I know Firaxis is not the first (or last) developer to do this. I know that it’s a common practice. But it pisses me off that the internet age has led to such a terrible degradation in the quality of PC game QA. On the one hand, it is great that software developers can add content through patching. It’s nice that they can fix bugs that sneak through. But shipping what’s basically unplayable crap, knowing full well you can, and will patch it, is sloppy and inexcusable. Good thing gamers are retards and put up with it.
Civ 4 (vanilla) is the worst example I’ve seen of quick-fixing. It took two patches to fix a major memory leak that made the game unplayable with less than a gig of RAM…
In fact, I still can’t bring myself to play the game on my own, because it lags for nearly a minute every turn near the end of the game. I usually end up playing Alpha Centauri instead because it’s rock-solid in comparison (not to mention awesome).
This is a unique and wonderful post. It is to the point, it touches all the right bases, and is well written on top of all that PC Gaming Hardware.