SimCity 5

[bhavv]

Unfortunately my game is already screwed over (again) because the education city wont draw any more power and water from the industrial city due to the server bugs, and the university remains unpowered lol.

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu!!!!!!

 

[J-man]

Unfortunately my game is already screwed over (again) because the education city wont draw any more power and water from the industrial city due to the server bugs, and the university remains unpowered lol.

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu!!!!!!

Yeah, at this point the game is too unstable to build large interconnected cities. You can build them but you risk losing them...

 

[bhavv]

And with the smaller city sizes, you cant fit a power plant and water / sewage / garbage dump into every city.

You're meant to be able to make a garbage dump power city in one city and then sell the services to the rest.

When my wind farm no longer suffices, I'll be tearing it down for a garbage incinerator and just burn away the entire regions garbage in one city

 

[civvver]

Free EA game? Still not gonna buy, this will probably price drop to $40 by end of summer tops, and $20 by christmas. I can wait.

 

[Maniacal]

RPS really isn't happy with Sim City and EA, mostly the online part.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/03/11/simcity-is-inherently-broken-lets-not-let-this-go/

 

[FriendlyFire]

RPS really isn't happy with Sim City and EA, mostly the online part.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/03/11/simcity-is-inherently-broken-lets-not-let-this-go/

I learnt my lesson from Diablo 3

 

[Marla_Singer]

I was really excited about Sim City 2013 coming out. My decision to buy a new computer has even been in part motivated by this new game. Unfortunately, I'm becoming a bit disillusioned.

What I've always liked in the Sim City series was the ability to design a city, but it doesn't seem to be the purpose of this game. Here the objective is to manage a city, or even a tiny bit of a city considering how ridiculously small are maps. I let you judge by yourself:

With maps of that size, conceiving urban planning isn't really the point. We just react ex-post to constraints getting at us: "I'm asked to do this, I'm asked to do that". I'm not denying this could be fun, but it's a much more passive approach for the player.

Considering my favorite aspect of the game has always been transportation, it's quite obvious that at such a scale there's not so much to do. We plug the city in the predetermined "regional entrance" and then that's done. In such a context, I can better understand why freeways and subways aren't part of the game.

 

[warpus]

And remember, those dots you have running around your incredibly tiny city is the only solution possible in the fight against piracy or so some people want you to think. We are living in the future, where amazing things are possible, and.. they give us this? This is a mockery.. a mockery!

 

[PieceOfMind]

To be fair, I think the limited city size has little to do with the DRM. Increased simulation fidelity causes higher complexity. Higher complexity causes more demand for (computer) resources per population. Higher resource demand causes greater restrictions to avoid game becoming sluggishly slow (as SC4 does when cities get particularly large, or Civ5 on largest mapsizes). Because the game is MP-focused (arguably due to being a nice excuse for DRM, mind you), there is greater importance for players on less powerful hardware to be able to "keep up" so to speak with other more privileged players with powerful PCs. This means the limits are set low enough that the game performance is similar for everyone, within reason.

Most of the server load I would expect is uploading/downloading saves. Even though the cities are small, there would still be a lot of data to each. No wonder the servers were slammed in the first days.

So in summary, my assumptions are:
1) Limited city size is because of higher complexity and average Simcity player using less powerful computer than a self-titled gamer.
2) Servers being unreliable is thanks to unnecessary DRM whereby savegames are not stored locally.

 

[Lord_Iggy]

I'd say I disagree pretty fundamentally with the idea of increasing simulation fidelity at the expense of simulation size, in a game such as Sim City. Let's be honest with ourselves, did anyone prefer to build cities on the smallest map size in Sim City 4?

At any rate, increasing the fidelity didn't appear to improve the series very much at all. Looking at the livestreams, the simulation doesn't seem that much 'better', just much more fine-grained.

 

[Marla_Singer]

And remember, those dots you have running around your incredibly tiny city is the only solution possible in the fight against piracy or so some people want you to think. We are living in the future, where amazing things are possible, and.. they give us this? This is a mockery.. a mockery!

Indeed, I remember that when I was young, games were actually planned to make you as free of your movements as possible. That's what I enjoyed in Sim City and in Civilization.

Nowadays, it seems there's a trend to consider freedom as "boring", some marketers probably determined that what people wanted was non-stop action for everything, and as such design their products this way.

A nice example is the Zelda games series. On older Zelda games, you really had the feeling to be free to do whatever you wanted in a fantasy world. In the last Zelda game on Wii, there's no freedom at all anymore, you're just asked to play levels one after the other, a bit like in Super Mario Galaxy.

And somehow, I never really got into Civ5 because it seems the game is only about war strategy. It seems really like a general trend.

 

[Thorgalaeg]

Absolutely agree. See for instance old RPGs. You were placed into a large world without any indication at all. It was supposed you would be able to find your way asking the characters, reading books you find, etc. Now even the RPGs which give you more "freedom" have this tiny marker showing you the way at any moment. It looks like today gamers cant think or read and must be constantly directed so they dont get lost. (For more information on the issue see my thread at the tavern: "Are we getting dumber?" )

 

[salty mud]

I blame Call of Duty. The first few games were fantastic but ever since then they've been getting dumber and dumber. "Blow this up to be awesome!" and "make this go boom with your grenade-firing-death-crossbow!" and people buy game after game of this garbage. No wonder developers think we're stupid.

 

[Thorgalaeg]

Yeah. I think the inflection point was around middle 2000s decade. Take for instance Morrowind (2003): not little marker there yet. However Oblivion (2006) had it (but IIRC you could still disable it, in Skyrim there is not even that).

 

[Maniacal]

That's called consolization, and it was around before CoD fell victim to it.

 

[salty mud]

What I don't understand though is why a PC only title would suffer "consolisation."

 

[warpus]

To be fair, I think the limited city size has little to do with the DRM. Increased simulation fidelity causes higher complexity.

That's the excuse, but today's computers are so much more powerful than the ones we had when SC4 came out, it's really not a very good one. Gaming worlds should be getting larger, not smaller!

If you design your game well enough, a large map is always possible these days, unless you want to simulate every single blade of grass individually or some other such silly thing.

There seems to be such a huge disconnect between EA and what the simcity enthusiast community really wanted out of the new simcity. We wanted bigger map sizes, not smaller. We wanted the majority of our gaming to be single player, not multiplayer. These are very fundamental game dynamics that they got wrong, and mostly in the name of combating piracy. I'm against piracy myself, but as soon as you're going to start sacrificing gameplay for it, that's where I start questioning your tactics. EA has killed many a game studio and franchise, and simcity just seems like the latest victim. At this point supporting EA with my money in any way just seems.. evil.

 

[peter grimes]

That's the excuse, but today's computers are so much more powerful than the ones we had when SC4 came out, it's really not a very good one. Gaming worlds should be getting larger, not smaller!

If you design your game well enough, a large map is always possible these days, unless you want to simulate every single blade of grass individually or some other such silly thing.

There seems to be such a huge disconnect between EA and what the simcity enthusiast community really wanted out of the new simcity. We wanted bigger map sizes, not smaller. We wanted the majority of our gaming to be single player, not multiplayer. These are very fundamental game dynamics that they got wrong, and mostly in the name of combating piracy. I'm against piracy myself, but as soon as you're going to start sacrificing gameplay for it, that's where I start questioning your tactics. EA has killed many a game studio and franchise, and simcity just seems like the latest victim. At this point supporting EA with my money in any way just seems.. evil.

I agree with almost everything you say here, but I question one thing. Is it not possible that we're all suffering from confirmation bias - because the game isn't the way we wish, we're only noticing the like-minded voices?

By [nearly] all measures, the game is wildly popular despite its catastrophic roll-out.

I'm still on the fence, actually. It seems like the sort of game that I'd enjoy spending an afternoon with here and there, but I can't justify the expense for something that I just won't play more than a couple hours a month. If the 'always on' aspect meant that I could leave the game running on my desktop and service the cities via my mobile, then I'd pre-order the mac version right now.

 

[warpus]

I agree with almost everything you say here, but I question one thing. Is it not possible that we're all suffering from confirmation bias - because the game isn't the way we wish, we're only noticing the like-minded voices?

By [nearly] all measures, the game is wildly popular despite its catastrophic roll-out.

I'm still on the fence, actually. It seems like the sort of game that I'd enjoy spending an afternoon with here and there, but I can't justify the expense for something that I just won't play more than a couple hours a month. If the 'always on' aspect meant that I could leave the game running on my desktop and service the cities via my mobile, then I'd pre-order the mac version right now.

I like to keep an open mind no matter what, and I do have to say that I'm impressed with certain aspects of the game, or at least what I've heard of them. It does sound like on a level it'd be fun! For a while..

My main appeal to the genre is building large cities in unique landscapes though. A lot of other city building gamers seem to share this sentiment. I want a place that I can screw around with, reload if I'm not happy with the way something went, maybe send in a random tornado for craps and giggles, build up a large metropolist. The more open of a sandbox this is, the better! Obviously there is a breaking point in terms of game balance - you do need to have a budget in the game and not an unlimited supply of cash.. But map size is one of those things that are non-negotiable for me. I laugh at the screenshot above. I can see the fun in building up and managing a game like that, but I see a LOT more fun in building up a city 10 times that size, not to mention being able to terraform the land a bit beforehand.

A lot of the aspects of the game that were the most fun for me have been taken away and things that I do not enjoy have been added. I can't support a game studio that does these things not in the name of gameplay - but rather in the name of profits.. or whatever. They gave us a game that they have such a tight control over - meanwhile what attracted me to the original simcity titles was how open the games were. It's just a step in the totally wrong direction for me - I can't support EA in any way. They have killed off a number of my favourite franchises and for that they must pay in blood.. err I mean a lack of profits from me.

 

[J-man]

I'm currently trying to acquire a refinery in my oil city so I can produce plastic, but the requirements are really steep!

Edit: Finally, I got the refinery.