Civ:BE -- beta stalled?

just kidding of course!

I have no interest in playing Civilization 5: Beyond Dearth, personally.

Just waiting for the new stuff to be added and then I'll play SK again. I really want to play the Guardian.

I stopped playing the beta once I completed a game after the last update.  We need some more content at this point to really balance/suggest properly.

I too am awaiting new content. Until then there is always GalCiv3!

According to a fair number of people, Civilization 5: Beyond Dearth is stalled in beta. Lol.

1. UI is atrocious. Queuing is so bothersome and that I don't use it - you have to click three times on different menus to put something on queue...only from city queue - no hotkeys, Ctrl or Alt modifiers from main map. In other words - you will waste more time on clicking than if you manually issue orders.
2. Diplomacy somehow managed to become even worse than in CivV, which is achievement on its own. With reduced unity types AI knows only ONE tactic - swarm of suicidal berserking human/tank waves.
3. Absolutely primitive execution of advertized features. Ie. Alien agressiveness is linked only to alien nest destruction it seems. You can shoot dozens upon dozens of aliens standing outside 2 tile radius from their nest without any fear of counterattack - Ai cannot into attack.
4. Absolute lack of any automation. If you have 10 cities then you have to manually isue each and every production order.
5. Leaders lack any personality - they are just animated talking heads.
6. Once again you are spammed with approvals, denouncations and gazillion other meaningless and useless notification via leader animation screen "we like that you like X", "We do not like that you like Y" etc every turn.
7. Trade routes - Firaxis showed phenomenal ability to make their own idea as terrible a possible - if with CivV you had to deal with 5 or so TR now you have 3 per city, you have to manually reassign EACH an EVERY of them.
Game miraculously managed to fall even below my lowest expectations. Beyond Eartyh serves only one purpose - to show how much Alpha Centauri surpasses it in every aspect except for graphics.

 

It is getting quite a few tepid reviews.

Ouch, that's rough.

Yep. It appears to be what I feared. A re-skinned Civilization 5 with a pasted on sci-fi theme.

I say they should bin it, leave sci-fi to Stardock and move on to Civ VI!

I might have to pop on over to BE forums to remind me of what it was like on the EWOM forums in Sep 2010. Ahh, those were lively times.

Beyond Dearth is worse, IMHO. They already had a base to build from.  They really have no excuse for delivering stale, warmed over dreck.

EWOM was brand new and as we all remember had a very difficult launch. They had a brand new engine and all the problems which came with that.

I have little to no interested in BE right now.  Maybe at 75% off.

Civ 5 disappointed me as much as War of Magic did (sorry Jon but I don't blame you for it- I think much of it was outside your control) , expansions improved it less than FE/LH.   Also, a ton of good games out now and upcoming.

It's just another case to me of a AAA publisher (Firaxis) getting bloated and having the quality of their games revert to average.  I just think the Firaxis we all loved is dead.  Hopefully I am wrong, I know Brad and others in the industry will say I'm wrong (I understand why- and I'm NOT saying Firaxis folks are bad folks/incompetent).   I do intend to give them a last chance with Civ 6, they've earned enough goodwill over the years that they earned a second chance.

Yep. Civilization 5 was and is horrendous. I don't blame Jon Shafer that much for it as, as you said, I think quite a bit of it was out of his control. I think the lion's share of the blame should go to greedy 2K Games who have been nothing but bad news for Civ fans.

Firaxis has delivered two clunkers in a row. Four, if you include the two Civilization 5 expansions. People's good will is wearing thin. Even the corrupt gaming media only gave Civilization 5: Beyond Dearth an 82 on metacritic, tied with Endless Legends. User reviews have given it a 6.5 and that score has been bloated by quite a few brain dead perfect 10 scores for that rubbish.

Civ VI is their last chance. I suggest they suck up to Stardock and get that 64 bit Nitrous engine licensed, for starters. They need to take their time and do it right. The only problem is greedy 2K Games will want another cash cow and I have a feeling Civilization 5: Beyond Dearth is not going to sell as well as they expected. So they'll likely release another half baked game to mollify their shareholders. Then the franchise will be done like dinner. (a half baked dinner, that is.)

I'm just wondering if it's possible for a AAA company to make a great game in a non mass-market genre.

Game is a mess. My biggest annoyance is that I can't easily find out what the world resources are for, or how to exploit them. What do I do with resilin, or biomass, or titanium? Civ5 tech tree was streamlined - you unlocked a resource, then immediately after you got buildings for it. BE tech tree is a jungle - I unlock a resource in one part of the tree, and find buildings for it in another direction. I guess in a year or two, after people have studied this jungle tech tree, it will make sense on some level. But for the beginner (and we are all beginners in this game) it's just poorly designed.

Seriously though. Does anyone know how I can use resilin? 

The new business model for the gaming industry is a blessing and a curse.

On one hand, with digital distribution, barriers to enyry have been lowered. You no longer have to pay for cd's or boxes, inventory holding cost.  Advertsing and promoting the game is much easier with Steam and the Internet in general. Also early release allows a developer to get cash upfront without delivering a complete product, nor any legal obligation to deliver one. Furthermore the long term value of games has been cheapened by the frequent sales and discounting. All this means is that developers have less incentive to follow through with a complete game.

And of course,the consumers attention spane has decreased over the past 20 years as well.

A better project would be to just re issue Alpha Centauri with graphics updated to current standards.  I'll bet Sid wishes he could take his name off the box....

Yeah, BE is a mess.  Even fundamental things like the UI are just atrociously designed, on a level that boggles my mind.  They've made basic UI design mistakes that I wouldn't expect even a decent modder to make, leaving me at a loss to explain how it happens at an established company like Firaxis.

Beyond that, the game design itself makes serious missteps, like spamming the player with minor choices and quests.  Choices are only interesting if they're important, and when there are that many of them, none of them can be very important.  Eventually it leaves me wanting a spam filter so it'll quit bothering me with "+1 this or +1 that" choices.

I'm usually hesitant to outright slam games on forums, but for BE I'm willing to make an exception.

Just make cIV with a 64 bit engine and updated graphics and I'll be content for a decade.

Sid has been rubber stamping the games for years. He's laughing all the way to the bank.

Detractors will always be more vocal than others. Beyond Earth is definitely more than a simple reskin of CiV.  Those who haven't even played it ought to relax until they actually play through the game.

Personally, I'm enjoying BE so far (only about 200 turns into my first game.)  I really like graphics.  The UI is average, I really miss the 'right click to close'  feature from Endless games.  The satellite idea is great, and I like the way they implemented the alien species.  I haven't got to the espionage system yet, but it looks a lot more enjoyable than the CiV version, and it shipped with the game.  The quests and affinities are fun features that keep you interested and can offer a lot of replayablity.  The Virtue system is much better than the CiV social policies.  I'm not completely sold on the tech web yet, but I still like it better than either Endless game or FE/LH so far (research is a weakness in these games imo), and Heavenfall - there is a keyword search feature in the top left corner of the research screen for when you're looking for something but might not be sure where it is.

I think a downfall of BE is that the leaders are too 'middle of the road' unlike Alpha Centauri, in which the differing leader ideologies made the game extremely fun to play.  The unitended result is that diplomacy is somewhat drab and lifeless.

Overall I think BE is a quality game that stands well on its own terms.

I tried entering resilin into the tech tree search box but it didn't show me anything. Then, after googling the resource I found out I needed to build a paddock from a wiki. That phrase, too, showed up nothing at all in the in-game search box. 

Just saw Tom Chick's review.  That's all I needed to convince me to not buy this period.  Firaxis right now just can't cut the mustard anymore in terms of making a good game in this genre.

I think Mr. Chick was being too kind (as was Thormodr for that matter).

There is a demo for anyone who wants to find out just how bad the game is, or isn't, first.

Heavenfall, this should help: http://well-of-souls.com/civ/civbe_overview.html (much of the info was gathered before release and it may not be completely up to date, but should still be useful).  The quick answer though is it is just a bonus resource (higher tile yield) and you can build a paddock on it from the start.

I guess what I've been experiencing is the early game portion of his review.  We'll see how it goes.

Tom Chick is spot on. I commend him for telling people that the Emperor truly has no clothes on.

I see that on metacritic, Civilization 5; Beyond Dearth receives an 8.2 from "professional" reviewers and 6.1 from users.

Saw this and had to laugh:

I played the demo over the weekend.  It really didn't impress me at all.