SimCity 5

[Maniacal]

Pissed that all your fire trucks train it to one fire while other fires are around? While less than ideal, this doesn’t “break” the game. Give them some time to work out the bugs and patch things.

It isn't just if one feature is broken, but if a LOT of stuff is broken, which has been the case with Sim City since its release.

And what does it matter if the online requirement was for DRM only or for server side processing and other features? It’s not like we didn't know that online only was the way it was going to be. And if you didn't you could have waited until the day after release to buy it and read up on it from people that did buy it before you. It doesn't really matter why EA said that online only was the way it was.

It does because they continually emphasized that the game was running a number of simulations on EA's servers to take the processing load off your your PC and this is why they had to have it be always-online. This of course turned out to be bullcrap as the game can run offline just as well as it does online. They also said this was due to the complexity and intelligence of the new simulations, which also turned out to be bullcrap as the AI is rather dumb.

Its also a matter of trust and EA flat out lied repeatedly.

The lesson here is to not buy a new game on day 1 (or pre-release for that matter). Wait a day or two and do some homework before buying. It isn’t hard to do, it just requires some patience.

Exactly, and it was quite obvious the game was going to a few problems long before it released. Although, a lot of its problems weren't obvious until after release and people had time to dig around and find out how truly broken it is.

I did just that, and decided to buy the game despite all of the reported problems.

*facepalms*

Is SimCity the best game ever? No. Is it functional and fun to play? Yes. Are there some things that are not optimal? Yes, but there have been 3-4 patches over the past couple of weeks and I have never had a server down issue.

Server downtimes improving with time was expected, especially since a lot of people have probably stopped playing it once they realized how severely flawed it is and how little time it takes to fill up a "city" plot.

 

[civvver]

What I meant by some bugs could be called features, like the traffic issues where sims all book it to the nearest workplace. Some might say that's a pathing algorithm bug but others might call it a feature. Even the money trucks not working right *could* in an extreme instance be called a feature. Maybe maxis devs want you to babysit them all the wall to the mayor's house. I don't know because I don't play it and am only going off info posted in this thread, but other than actual crashes it's kind of hard to say this is a game breaking money back deserving bug. Most software you purchase as is. If you put too much user protection into games then devs won't even make them because everyone will demand refunds if they don't like the game. They'll make up some bug.

 

[Maniacal]

What I meant by some bugs could be called features, like the traffic issues where sims all book it to the nearest workplace. Some might say that's a pathing algorithm bug but others might call it a feature. Even the money trucks not working right *could* in an extreme instance be called a feature. Maybe maxis devs want you to babysit them all the wall to the mayor's house. I don't know because I don't play it and am only going off info posted in this thread, but other than actual crashes it's kind of hard to say this is a game breaking money back deserving bug. Most software you purchase as is.

I think you're stretching it a lot. The money trucks and inter-city gifts not arriving is definitely a bug.

If you put too much user protection into games then devs won't even make them because everyone will demand refunds if they don't like the game. They'll make up some bug.

Aye.

 

[warpus]

Oh yeah, I call a lot of the bugs in my web apps "features" It's a bit of an inside joke, though.

 

[RD-BH]

??? Leaving SimCity ...

Spoiler :

How's that working for you?

 

[Antilogic]

Highways not having on-ramps? Buildings in streets?

Feature.

 

[Maniacal]

I appreciate the art style they are going for, but it leaves much to be desired detail wise, the pixel art of the previous games was so much more detailed and nicer looking.

 

[Thorgalaeg]

What about a three way highway and all the cars forming a line in the right lane. Also a feature?

 

[Antilogic]

What about a three way highway and all the cars forming a line in the right lane. Also a feature?

That's a power user feature.

 

[cybrxkhan]

I appreciate the art style they are going for, but it leaves much to be desired detail wise, the pixel art of the previous games was so much more detailed and nicer looking.

Gotta agree. The way-too-clean look of the new art makes it look sort of cartoony in a way.

 

[PreLynMax]

Too much traffic!
...and crime...
...and fires...
...and pollution...
...no health or sanitary services...

Actually, there's a LOT of things wrong with this city.

Try to spot all of them.

 

[BSmith1068]

Love the street instead of avenue as main entry into the city. That, along with the 3 casinos is probably most of your traffic problem. The other problems may stem from the traffic issues.

But hey - you're making over 5K per hour plus your oil revenues - so you're not all that bad.

 

[J-man]

Yeah, demolish that street and a place an avenue plus some park & rides along it.

 

[PieceOfMind]

So EA are now trying to dodge the issue of DRM by insisting that SimCity is, and always was designed to be, an MMO.

"At no point in time did anybody say 'you must make this online'. It was the creative people on the team that thought it was best to create a multiplayer collaborative experience and when you're building entertainment... you don't always know what the customer is going to want. You have to innovate and try new things and surprise people and in this particular case that's what we sought to achieve. If you play an MMO, you don't demand an offline mode, you just don't. And in fact, SimCity started out and felt like an MMO more than anything else and it plays like an MMO,"

(link: EA: "DRM is a failed dead-end strategy")

I guess what he means is:
-We wanted to get in on that constant revenue stream of online gaming where you charge users for in-game items and you can't do that without basically requiring them to be always online, and if you can't justify that by DRM you can only do that by making it massively multiplayer, so we made sure the traditionally single-player experience of SimCity was at least slightly multiplayer so we could call it MMO. And then all the people calling it DRM we can label as haters or conspiracy theorists.

 

[warpus]

you don't always know what the customer is going to want. You have to innovate and try new things and surprise people and in this particular case that's what we sought to achieve. If you play an MMO, you don't demand an offline mode, you just don't. And in fact, SimCity started out and felt like an MMO more than anything else and it plays like an MMO.

That's funny, because if they had done just the tiniest amount of research, they would have learned that a huge chunk of the simcity franchise fanbase & people who enjoy games like that want a game that's as open as possible, as sandbox as possible, with single player being a huge chunk of the gaming experience.

But yeah, they probably knew all that, but went down the "MMO" route for other reasons

 

[ZeletDude]

Too much traffic!
...and crime...
...and fires...
...and pollution...
...no health or sanitary services...

Actually, there's a LOT of things wrong with this city.

Try to spot all of them.

The real problem is that the game is being played.

 

[Antilogic]

Is that your game or a promotional picture of nighttime gridlock?

 

[RD-BH]

The EA business model:

Oops! I see they are having server problems ...

Strange, the servers were working during press review ...

 

[peter grimes]

So EA are now trying to dodge the issue of DRM by insisting that SimCity is, and always was designed to be, an MMO.

-We wanted to get in on that constant revenue stream of online gaming where you charge users for in-game items and you can't do that without basically requiring them to be always online, and if you can't justify that by DRM you can only do that by making it massively multiplayer, so we made sure the traditionally single-player experience of SimCity was at least slightly multiplayer so we could call it MMO. And then all the people calling it DRM we can label as haters or conspiracy theorists.

Except that, as I've mentioned elsewhere, they FAILED to provide a MMO. I don't think that acronym means what he thinks it means. Are the multiplayer aspects even re-started yet? If you're setting out to design a multiplayer game what does it mean when you have to disable the multiplayer features for the first 3 or 4 weeks? I think it means you didn't really try to make a MMO.

A colleague of my brother's - a game developer - sent me an email with some interesting thoughts. I'll paste them here:

As someone who releases games and websites to the public - there's always a bit of "we'll fix it in post." EA knows what they're doing. I'm sure the launch of this was more fueled by the response they received from their demo at the 2012 Game Developers Conference. They were probably expecting to have two more years of development, but then EA jumped on Maxis and said "This is hot - run with it!" Then purchased a crazy media campaign with commercials featuring the idiot from Workaholics. Once a media buy is in place, it's damn near impossible to move a launch date. You can probably see how things spiral out of control from here.

[snip]

I'm a little 'okay' with the server issues that EA has had launching this game. Although it's a bit unbelievable that after a couple months of beta testing, they weren't ready for the flood of users. Over all, I have had a chance to play the game - quite a bit even.

I'm sure they'll patch-out all of the issues they're having with path-finding and 'sim' life.

The thing I really don't like about SimCity V (2013?) is that you can't save.

One of my favorite aspects of the series was constantly saving and having a roll-back point just in case everything goes to . It's especially handy when you spend days building something you're proud of, only to be learn that you made a mistake by spending all of your money doing something stupid. OR ... when you decide to just launch every natural disaster on your city, just for shits and giggles.

With the new game, you basically have to play like at any second, you're going to abandon your city.

This is especially annoying considering you're suppose to play "seriously" with other members online. You build relationships with their city, relying on power, sewage, trash, workers, etc... Then you find out that they abandoned their city and your city goes to .

Which leads me to another annoyance...

The only way to build a successful large city is to basically have two cities - one smaller one that specializes in pollution. Such as garbage. BUT! This doesn't work considering the games mechanics do not encourage you to remain small.

 

[J-man]

Zero punctuation has done a review on simcity:

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/7053-SimCity

A funny and pretty accurate review imo.