MOO3 finished!

[Dobian]

Stability: I consider a game to be very stable if it crashes once for every ten hours I put into it. And I have a lot of games that meet this standard (including SE4 ).

Value: I picked up Might and Magic 4-8 a year ago for a grand total of 11 bucks. To date, I've logged somewhere in the neighborhood of 250 hours on MM6-MM8. Now that's value.

[couslee]

" The game is still better than it's immediate predecessor SMAC, which has the ridiculous unit design mechanism that allows you to kill attackers armed with the best weapons by putting better armour on you units. "

Oh horsepucky. I played SMAC for a couple of years. Civ3 Lasted about 2 games before getting deleted. And yea, gee, it's amazing that if you put your best armor on your units, you have a greater chance of defeating an attacker.

You love Civ3, that is apparent, I hated it. so what. Opinions are like a**holes. every has their own, and it's usually full of crap.

When you talk about value in a game, value in an item is based on a standard that people are use to. A good meal at a nice restaruant can cost $20 a plate, and your done eating in 30-60 minutes. If you compare that to a $20 game you play for a whole day, then the meal looks like a bad value and the game looks like a good value. That, is comparing apples to oranges and is no basis for comparison. $20 for a one day game is poor. $20 for a tasty meal is not. Stick with apples and apples and leave the other fruit in the fridge.
Customers have come to expect games, esp in the 4x genre', to have months and months of enjoyment. If the game playability is bad because of bugs, balancing issues, hardware issues, ect to the point it is not worth the effort loading up, and you just bought the game, it's not a good value.
You talk about playing several new games a month. At $45-50 a copy for new games, you must have an unlimited game budget. Must be nice. I, and the majority of gamers do not have that much money to burn. We expect value (meaning dollar spent, per game hour enjoyed, per industry standard). And lately, most games have fallen short of that mark. imnsho

[ January 26, 2003, 12:15: Message edited by: couslee ]

[steveh11]

Well, this thread doesn't have much to do with MOO3 anymore...

I own and still play SMAC, especially the expanded variant (Alien Crossfire). I played Civ2 for years. I never bought Civ3 because of gameplay issues I'd read about - this is the first I've heard of it having other problems. But I had been considering getting it despite these because:

I own and still play Europa Universalis - more recently EU2 - and that definitely had bugs and 'features' that needed work, but it was a fun thing to play even out of the box, and Paradox worked hard with the user community to improve it.

Similarly, SE has improved over the years. I still play that too - obviously!

Even a hard-core wargame such as Uncommon Valor from Matrix Games is now up to Version 2.20, having fixed many gameplay issues, and some more serious faults. (I don't own this yet but I'm likely to buy it in the next couple of months or so.)

So I think that in general it's wrong to think that you'll get a finished, polished product at first issue. As complex as games like these have become it needs 'road testing' to fix it within the limited resources of the companies we buy from. Yes, even EA - Last I looked they didn't have the budget of the US military, and look what they sometimes come up with!

Steve.

[Egregius]

Originally posted by Graeme Dice:
Like anything else you do on a computer, you should be saving no less than every five to ten minutes. If it's word processing, I save every thirty seconds.

DUDE!

You need to get a better computer! How on earth do you want to get any play done with saving every 5 minutes, or any typing done with saving every 30 seconds?!?
Heck, saving in Baldur's Gate 1 cost me 5 minutes each time, having to save every 5 minutes is flat out ridiculous.

[DavidG]

Originally posted by Graeme Dice:
I expect no more than a week of play from a game that is a true classic, because that's all the time one can spend on a game if you wish to play more than one a month. Sure, a really great game gets more play time, but that doesn't make one that only Lasts a weekend a bad game, just a normal length game.

Man you have intensly low expectations!! And one crash per hour is terrible!!! I'm amazed anyone could describe that as pretty stable. Game manufacturers must love you!

[Graeme Dice]

Originally posted by Egregius:
You need to get a better computer! How on earth do you want to get any play done with saving every 5 minutes, or any typing done with saving every 30 seconds?!?

There's a reason that quicksaves exist, and in Word you just press ctrl-s after every paragraph. It takes about one second to save your average text document, so I don't see a problem there.

Heck, saving in Baldur's Gate 1 cost me 5 minutes each time, having to save every 5 minutes is flat out ridiculous.

Then you must have a slow harddrive. BG1 takes 10-30 seconds on my machine to make a quicksave.

[Graeme Dice]

Originally posted by couslee:
Oh horsepucky. I played SMAC for a couple of years. Civ3 Lasted about 2 games before getting deleted. And yea, gee, it's amazing that if you put your best armor on your units, you have a greater chance of defeating an attacker.

No, it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. You don't need weapons of any kind on defensive units, which is ridiculous. You can place the best armour on themn and punch airplanes to death.

You love Civ3, that is apparent, I hated it. so what. Opinions are like a**holes. every has their own, and it's usually full of crap.

Please keep the insults out of this forum.

$20 for a one day game is poor. $20 for a tasty meal is not. Stick with apples and apples and leave the other fruit in the fridge.

Wrong, $20 for a one day game is excellent value, $20 for a meal is an utter waste of money.

Customers have come to expect games, esp in the 4x genre', to have months and months of enjoyment. If the game playability is bad because of bugs, balancing issues, hardware issues, ect to the point it is not worth the effort loading up, and you just bought the game, it's not a good value.

Which is not what I ever claimed. Please learn to read before you start making claims about what I said.

You talk about playing several new games a month. At $45-50 a copy for new games, you must have an unlimited game budget.

No, I'm simply a student who knows where he wants to spend his entertainment budget instead of wasting it on food and booze.

Must be nice. I, and the majority of gamers do not have that much money to burn. We expect value (meaning dollar spent, per game hour enjoyed, per industry standard). And lately, most games have fallen short of that mark. imnsho

Please name these "most games". I at least have named games that did not fall short.