SimCity (2013)

[Yougirasu]

Yes, I'm finally bringing this subject to a thread of it's own and not just mentioning my observations in the ASB TO.

Following on a trend of games that have reverted back to their original names for a brand new release, SimCity has hit the shelves in some places and is hitting the internet like a sledgehammer to the face.
SimCity, is obviously about building a city. This seems to involve (at least in this version) laying roads about a moderately sized area, providing power, water and waste management. After that, you go into 'zoning' the areas around the roads you made, determining if they'll be for residential, commercial and industrial. Once you've got all the basics and some actual income you end up supplying the necessities to keep the city afloat whilst working towards upgrades to additional buildings such as unlocking a specific type of school for residents to learn at. And of course, things are never simple as you have to deal with the after effects of various, random catastrophes (Meteors, Godzilla, etc.).
Despite having only just been released this week (5th US, 7th EU, AU, JP, 8th UK (gee, thanks EA)), SimCity has notched a host of awards from E3 prior to its release and could be a strong game. (note that all this has come from someone who's never played a SimCity or seen SimCity outside of a few YT vids and a several hour stream today)

Outside of facts, facts, facts, take note that the main thing to take from the last sentence is the word 'could'. The game is receiving heavy, damaging comments over its initial release and the observation that EA is unwilling to relinquish control of the game.
Looking at the first point that far, far too many people have brought up, the game has already suffered from extended loading times, disconnections, crashing, loss of saved data and, in one case I've heard of, causing a player to blue-screen after 30 minutes of gameplay. And to cover all these, I'll need to look at the second point.
EA is showing a serious issue with control when it comes to this game, although they're advertising it as making the game accessible to people on far older computers. Essentially, everything that you would use for online play, that you would put onto a server, they have. On their servers. Everything. While this would relieve the stress that older computers might suffer, it also means that your regions, cities, saves, etc. are all on EAs servers, you can't access them at all. There's no trying something for the first time, unsure of what'll happen and then going back when it all falls apart, generally no world management should you be new and want to test the water. Then, sadly, you have to throw onto that the single-player option for the game. Which is simply multiplayer, but with a private region. So, to play this game, you're required to have a solid, stable internet connection regardless of whether you're playing alone or with friends.
Looping back to the first post, several of the problems that people are lashing out over, loading times, disconnections, loss of data, these are all coming from EAs seemingly poor management of their servers. It was reported that EA were observing pre-orders to ensure that their servers would be up to scratch for the release, and quite obviously that wasn't the case. In the case of the stream I watched today, the streamer had already been booted from one server when it dc'd them and went onto another (causing them to have to start a city from scratch, all over again). Within the space of an hour or so, they lost connection to the server they were on and were eventually forced onto a third server, for a third city. This repeated again later, bringing a fourth server and a fourth city. Safe to say, all of this frustrated the streamer to no end, especially as one city seemed to vanish into the void of EA's servers.

All that said, it still looks like a good game although you would have to watch out for EA canning the servers at some point in the future, essentially making your purchase redundant unless they put up a download for the mechanics behind them to let you host your own games. And, I am considering buying the game. I only say considering because I'm waiting and watching, to see how their servers adjust with all the problems they've encountered. I have to say that if things remain as they are (and note that the UK doesn't even have access to this game yet), then it wouldn't be worth the purchase. But, if they rise to the challenge, strengthen the current servers and throw out even more for people to join, then and only then might it be worth paying out to join friends and strangers on the game.

I wonder who, if anyone, else would be considering picking up this game. After all, if they do sort things out in a timely fashion, I'd like to have people to build with (I do have this texan streamer who I might be able to build with). Also, I'd like to know what people think over the issues that EA seem to have caused everyone who's bought their game.

[Lady Kuno]

I love (the older) sim city games. I keep hoping they make a good new sim city game instead of the new stuff they put out. I was never a fan of the side games (sims, spore, etc).

Sim Earth and Sim City 2000 for life.

[Talon87]

Quoting Jerry Holkins a.k.a. Tycho from Penny Arcade's take on this:

Gabriel wasn’t able to get into SimCity last night to play, because the server wasn’t working and single player games don’t exist anymore, even if you are playing a private city and nobody can come in anyway. So I would remember it, because it was important, I said here in the post a long time ago that “EA games come with free misery.” This is why I stopped being an annual purchaser of Tiger Woods games: because this company has a serious, serious problem with execution at launch. You would only fix it if it meant more sales. But it doesn’t, because everybody already bought it. Well, except me.

See above.

I don't know that I've ever owned an EA game? Back before they had gotten too big, they mostly did sports and cheap action games. The only cheap action game I've ever bought from one of these sorts publishers was Call of Duty (2004), and that wasn't even EA: that was the other EA, Activision. (I always get the two mixed up. ) So since I've never actually purchased an EA game, I don't really know what their deal is other than what I've heard second-hand through the Internet over the years or briefly seen with my own two eyes while playing at friends' houses. [/disclaimer]

But what I've heard over the years is that EA is pretty much the stereotypical "mega-corporate evil moneygrubbers" you always here nerds railing against ... except this time they're for real and not just some bogeyman of a liberal conspiracy theorist's imagination. They seem to have a very "use and abuse" relationship with their customers where they'll release glitchy or deliberately shitty games, implement every single trick under the sun to make an extra buck (DRM, DLC, incessant sequels with only marginal improvements over previous iterations yet billed as brand-new games), and yet their customers, despite crying foul over these abuses, will keep coming back for more. It really does seem analogous to an abusive relationship between two people, but in this case it's millions of willingly-stupid customers and one company that is only too happy to take all of their cash. ... Come to think of it, weren't EA the ones who got into hot water for releasing a FIFA game for the Wii that was pretty much a 99.3% identical port of the previous FIFA game? Yes, yes they were! So yeah. That should tell you all you really need to know about the sort of company you're dealing with here.

The company line about "we've set this system up so that you guys can play the game even if you have really shitty computers" is PR bullshit that they're just spouting because offsite gaming (where you use your Internet connection to connect to someone else's souped-up gaming PC to do all of your high-end gaming) is currently all the rage amongst tech geek gamers. But it's pretty clear what is going on here: control, control, control. Not content with the on-disc DRM of the 2000s and quite pleased with the successful anti-piracy endeavors of most MMORPG projects (which require you to be online to play and which keep all of your crucial information stored server-side), EA and other publishers have decided that it would be ideal if they could force players of all their games into similar situations. One, requiring you to always be connected to the Internet while you play the game. Two, keeping all of your crucial save file or game data stored on the server. Just like with an MMORPG. The only problem is, people fucking hate always-online DRM bullshit, and they've put up with it for MMOs and the like because those genres pretty much do require you to be online to play them in the first place. I mean, there's no such thing as single player WoW. But games like Sim City or StarCraft II? Yeah, people aren't pleased.

There's really only one viable solution to this problem, and that's for people to quit buying these companies' games and to start voting with their dollars by purchasing competitors' DRM-free titles instead. They may be slightly less shiny or slightly more glitchy (although in EA's case I doubt both ), but at least they're DRM-free. If people do this, then the profit-seeking companies will realize, "Hey: DRM is actually hurting us more than it's helping us" and they'll cut it out. But so long as it helps them more than it hurts them -- so long as people continue to buy these games by the millions -- they'll keep on doing it, even if gamers like your friend complain about it to their friends and family.

[Muyotwo]

But I will never buy a game with Always-online DRM. Right now I'm just hoping that this fad will die out before the Sims 4 releases, otherwise that will be the end of my EA days.

[Amras.MG]

Originally Posted by Muyotwo

But I will never buy a game with Always-online DRM. Right now I'm just hoping that this fad will die out before the Sims 4 releases, otherwise that will be the end of my EA days.

Was just thinking about this earlier today. If they try to make Sims 4 always-online, always-multiplayer, I'm done.

[deoxys]

Yep. SimCity is shit now because not only is it always online, you have to connect to a server just to play it. Which is a shame because it actually looked neat.

Amazon stopped selling them earlier today citing complaints of people not being able to play.


The concept sounded good on paper, having the multiplayer aspect essentially making it one huge world of cities interconnected, but that's just it: good on paper. It was horribly executed as a thinly veiled way of having always on DRM, worse than what Diablo 3 did, and that was part of the reason that fad died so quickly.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to look into buying a good SimCity: SimCity 2000.

[deoxys]

And might I just add:

http://www.polygon.com/game/simcity-...update_3815485


Initial review score from internal use: 9.5 out of 10

Updated a day later once the game went public: 8 out of 10

Updated today after more issues arose: 4 out of 10

Originally Posted by Polygon

The question of whether or not EA would be able to support a large, enthusiastic audience for SimCity with a robust server system has been answered with a resounding "no," at least for the time being.

Since the official release of SimCity I have repeatedly tried to replicate the experiences I had reviewing the game with pre-release code on EA's development servers, and repeatedly I have not been able to — not entirely.

The server issues have been more troublesome, and have prevented me (and many players, we learned anecdotally) from connecting to the game at all. On launch day, during a period of roughly five hours, I experienced the same number of server-related game failures as in my entire 50 hours of review the game pre-release. That the experience of connecting to the game was, effectively, 10 times worse contributed to Polygon's decision to lower the score for SimCity (from 9.5 to 8 ).

In all other respects, however, when I have been able to access the servers to play SimCity, the experience I have had with it post-launch has been the same as it was pre-launch.

Until today.

EA's decision to remove certain features of the game in order to attempt to stabilize server performance has resulted in a dramatic change to the way SimCity is played and, in my experience, has not stabilized the server situation.

In attempting to play SimCity today, it took me over half an hour to load a game, during which time my connection to the servers dropped repeatedly, multiple attempts to load the city were aborted, and I finally had to "trick" the game into showing me (and then, finally, loading) my city by accessing the list of games present in the drop-down Origin profile menu. The main "Resume Game" button and the list of games in progress both would not show or load a city.

Even then, immediately after finally managing to load my city (New Pittssex), I received a notice that connection to the servers had dropped, suggesting my ability to actually load a game had been blind luck. Had the process taken a second or two longer, it would most likely not have loaded at all, as happened in approximately ten tries previously.

That said, the experience of connecting to a game and loading a city can not be said to be measurably worse (or better) than it has been since launch. Merely bad in a slightly different way. These same issues (and more) have been present since the game was released. What has changed is the experience of playing.

One of EA's major changes to the game has been the removal of "Cheetah" mode. SimCity allows you to alter the speed at which time passes so that you can make changes to your city and then see the results more quickly, or slow things down to address problems in "slower than normal" time. There are three speed settings, and they are "Turtle," "Llama" and "Cheetah." Corresponding roughly to slow, normal and fast.

With the removal of Cheetah mode, SimCity is now stuck with merely slow and normal, which would at first not seem to be too great an imposition, but in reality has drastically changed the manner in which the game can be played. The short version of which is: It's less fun.

EA has also (temporarily, they say) disabled SimCity's leaderboards, which allow players to see how well they are doing against other players worldwide, and the achievements system. I was able to access the achievements I had unlocked previously, but I will not accrue any new ones with this feature turned off. That's not a huge issue for me overall, but as a feature that was once present, but now is not, it's a big deal.

More problematic are the leaderboards. For a game advertised to be connected and social experience, the loss of the ability to see how you rank against other players is devastating. And, more troubling, accessing neighboring cities and finding the cities of my friends, using the Origin Friends service, has taken a dramatic stability hit. Even attempting to load a neighboring city causes my game to crash.

Given this currently horrendous state of both accessibility and playability, and acknowledging the fact that even the drastic changes EA has made to the game in its attempts to address them haven't worked, it is hard to continue to recommend SimCity. The experience currently on offer is now significantly altered from what was reviewed, and there is simply no guarantee that the existing server issues will go away, nor what further changes may be made to the game in order to address them.

- Russ Pitts, Polygon Features Editor and SimCity reviewer

Holy shit! I have never heard of anything like this happening before. Astonishing.

And with that, how Polygon uniquely reviews games.

[Kori Gotcha]

I couldn't run the game anyway with my current computer, but as things are and will be, I won't be buying a game that forces multiplayer on me for what is supposed to be a single player game nor will I support and encourage these practices with a buy just for the hope that they'll get their shit together one day. They dropped the ball hard on this. I didn't get Diablo 3 either for these very same reasons. EA really shit the bed on this one and until they put out an actual single player version of SimCity, I won't be considering this. I'll just enjoy my Sims 3.

[deoxys]

Oh wow it just gets better.

EA suspends all marketing for SimCity, asks affiliates to stop promoting it.

[Yougirasu]

Wow, that's just... Wow.

In other news, here's how you should play SimCity. But everything makes me so glad that I heard about this game only days before its American release, otherwise I might have been one of the masses stuck in the queues and stuff.

[Talon87]

SimCity’s next big problem: EA is selling a game that may not work, and is refusing refunds

This image:

Spoiler: show

is pretty typical in my experience when dealing with big mega-corps. Glad to see the gamers rallying their pitchforks in serious measure and talking about stuff like the FCC, Better Business Bureau, small claims court, and of course everyone's favorite the class-action lawsuit. A lot of it is probably just nerds being nerds and talking about things they'll never actually go and do because le effort and le scariness of real litigation, but it's still nice to at least see people so energetically discussing all of these very real options.

[deoxys]

Ah yes, it's been a while since I've read an EA chat that made me incredibly angry

Alas, fuck EA. /brave

[Tyranidos]

Keep in mind that the customer service rep had nothing to do with SimCity's failure and probably hates EA more than you do. I often have more sympathy for them than the people who bought the game.

[deoxys]

Originally Posted by Tyranidos

Keep in mind that the customer service rep had nothing to do with SimCity's failure and probably hates EA more than you do. I often have more sympathy for them than the people who bought the game.

I'm not mad at the attendant, he was just doing his job. I'm mad at EA's horrible policy, not to mention the fact that they outright lied in saying they were accepting refunds and then, just... NOPE.

Also, I've seen this sort of thing with Origin customer service one to many times.

So... might statement still stands. Fuck EA.

[Amras.MG]

I've been following this on Polygon all day and it's really interesting/horrifying. Always-online/no offline single player is a HORRIBLE thing for the industry.

[Kori Gotcha]

EA recognizes they were unprepared and are giving a free EA game to anyone who bought SimCity
http://kotaku.com/5989630/ea-will-gi...ium=Socialflow

[Amras.MG]

Somehow I went from that link, to looking it up on Polygon because LOL KOTAKU to looking at their "Journey violin youtube video" article, to listening to the Journey soundtrack... awesome.

Anyways, not really sure what the rational behind this is. Why not just offer refunds? Is it cheaper in the long run to just offer older games when you risk alienating your pre-order crowd (aka the core gamers)?

[Talon87]

The answer is "Yes." It is always better to offer a $n voucher while keeping the $n you already received than it is to give back the $n (hence why so many companies force this on people). The reason being:

If you give away a free $n game while keeping the $n they gave you, you've made $n divided by 2 on both games. If you give a full refund instead and the customer doesn't choose to put that money towards another of your games, you've now made $0 divided by 1. Using real numbers: $60/$120 is a 50% cut, but it's still categorically better than $0/60. Their absolute difference is the same -- $60 not gained -- but in the one you've still at least retained 50% of your income while in the other you've retained none of it.

[deoxys]

I don't want to sound like one of the truly entitled gamer crowd I've come to loathe, but honestly this is just a publicity stunt to save face for a now spiraling out of control situation, and it's pretty pathetic. Cool for the people who get a free game, but what they hope it does is pacify the upset and make you put this whole thing behind you by the time next week rolls around so that they can play the same old song and dance once again down the road with little opposition. Now any time someone brings this up in regards to a similar situation down the road, someone will inevitably respond "And they gave you a free game for it, so stop being an entitled brat!"

So basically, whatever. You know what they could do to alleviate the situation? They could announce that they are working on a way for players to not have to be connected to a server or have a wait time to play a single player game they just payed $50 for.

[Doppleganger]

I'm with Muyo. I'm not patronizing Blizzard either, since they're doing the same stuff with SCII and D3.

[Talon87]

Originally Posted by deoxys

So basically, whatever. You know what they could do to alleviate the situation? They could announce that they are working on a way for players to not have to be connected to a server or have a wait time to play a single player game they just payed $50 for.

The problem with that is, DRM isn't necessarily to a game like a tail light is to a car: it's not always easily removable or replaceable. Depending on how the developers program the game, it can be more like the undercarriage of a car. If EA designed this game, not just at a boardroom conceptual level but at a programming "this is how things actually work" level, to always be online, to communicate specific information at certain times between two machines (yours and theirs), to pretty much function like an MMORPG (and under many of the same assumptions), then it's possible that a "fix" that enables you to play SimCity offline on your computer could take months to develop, not days, and would virtually amount to an entirely new game, built from the ground up, being built. That could be what's going on here. We'll know in a couple weeks time. If in two weeks we see a patch that gives gamers everything they requested, then we'll know that the always-online DRM was a superficially implemented piece of code. If, on the other hand, in two weeks we see SimCity having been pulled from store shelves, the lead developer being scapegoatedly fired, and promises of a new and improved SimCity in several months' time, then we'll know we were dealing with heavily-integrated DRM, with coding design that at its most fundamental of levels simply assumed that the player would always be online and would be playing this game between two separate machines (a server and a PC).

[Amras.MG]

Actually Talon we already know the answer to that: SimCity does not have a single player mode because there is absolutely no way to play the game offline, from the ground up. DRM and servers are integrated into the framework of the game. By unloading some of the required resources to play the game onto the server side, with the goal of always-online DRM and lowering the min. requirements for the game, the only way to play SimCity offline is to go to a store and buy SimCity 4, because the game just plain can't run without a connection to servers.

I feel bad for consumers and don't feel bad at the same time. We've known SimCity doesn't have single player for a while, so I'm not sure why everyone's bitching about it: unless it doesn't say it on the box or description page, in which case bitch away.

Very relevant, answers some of your questions Talon

[Talon87]

Originally Posted by Amras.MG

there is absolutely no way to play the game offline

Originally Posted by Amras.MG

the only way to play SimCity offline is to go to a store and buy SimCity 4, because the game just plain can't run without a connection to servers.

Come again?

1) You say it's not possible to play the game offline ... but then you say that there is a way.

2) In the very sentence where you explain how to play the game offline ... you reiterate its requisite connection to the Internet.

[MarbleZone]

Originally Posted by Talon87

Come again?

1) You say it's not possible to play the game offline ... but then you say that there is a way.

2) In the very sentence where you explain how to play the game offline ... you reiterate its requisite connection to the Internet.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimCity_4

[Talon87]

Ohhhhhhhhhh I thought this newest one (2013) was Sim City 4. Gotcha.