Because EA financial year end is Mar 31st.
...see above.
I think this vid explains the problems of EA perfectly, just replace 'Bioware' with Maxis, and 'three dudes' with 'Will Wright'...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6TmTv6deTI
SimCity 5
- Thread starter KMRblue1027
- Start date
Because EA financial year end is Mar 31st.
...see above.
I think this vid explains the problems of EA perfectly, just replace 'Bioware' with Maxis, and 'three dudes' with 'Will Wright'...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6TmTv6deTI
Actually, I think this whole situation can be excellent for the future of PC gaming at large.
warpus
Sommerswerd asked me to change this
Maybe they wanted some of these "impossible" features that are possible to be marketed as DLC, at various points in the future?
salty mud
Deity
Will a disaster of this scale have an effect on gaming as a whole?
I don't see how it could be bad. Hopefully it's the death knell for online DRM.
warpus
Sommerswerd asked me to change this
I doubt it, online DRM has worked very well in some cases, like the latest Diablo. There were some issues during the launch as well, but everything was smoothed out fairly quickly IIRC. It's also made it fairly difficult to pirate that game, unless I'm not in the know or something.
Just read through the thread
Did EA honestly think that this so of discovery could remain hidden?
I feel really badly for the developers. Life must really suck for those people.
Ea really screwed up.
cybrxkhan
Asian Xwedodah
Yeah, you guys have a point on that.
I'm just sad that it's SimCity that has to take it. While I may have actively enjoyed other games like the Civilization series, or the Sims, or TES, SimCity is and will always be there quietly and humbly in the background, my true favorite game series and one I worship as a living God - it's been around with me since I was in early elementary school, for goodness sake. No video game compares. Pity it had to be the sacrificial lamb in this case.
Still, as Manical said, I'm surprised EA tried to get away with this much. I mean, I'm no lover of EA, and I thought the EA hatedom just went a bit, bit too far - but I didn't think they could be this bad. Well, guess it's easier to join the EA hatedom when they destroy your most favorite game series of all time.
warpus
Sommerswerd asked me to change this
See, the problem is probably that the directives are passed down from company bigwigs who have little, if any, understanding of technology. If they have just a bunch of yes men working right underneath them, there's not going to be anybody in the chain of command who will have the guts to say "hey, wait a second". Everyone will just want to do what they're told, so that no problems can get traced back to them. It's the age old "I was just following orders" excuse, which is all you need in the corporate world. If you were following your manager's instructions to the dot, you can't possibly be blamed for any screwups.
The developers probably knew that there would be issues.. but they couldn't really do or say anything. They have families to feed, so they march to the beat of the drum.
The bigwigs meanwhile only answer to the shareholders, so usually they will try to do anything possible to increase profits. Meanwhile the developers, the ones that truly understand the implications of the requests being passed down, in terms of gameplay, do not have a voice.
The developers probably knew that there would be issues.. but they couldn't really do or say anything. They have families to feed, so they march to the beat of the drum.
The bigwigs meanwhile only answer to the shareholders, so usually they will try to do anything possible to increase profits. Meanwhile the developers, the ones that truly understand the implications of the requests being passed down, in terms of gameplay, do not have a voice.
That's actually an improvement from the rating it was at last time I checked, unless metacritic has separate values for player reviews and paid-off website reviews.
Thorgalaeg
Deity
What looks obvious for me is that good games future is not in big companies anymore but small developers who distribute the game themselves like for instance Kerbal Space Program or even freeware projects like Orbiter.
Polycrates
Emperor
- Joined
- Dec 15, 2006
- Messages
- 1,288
DRM aside, the issues with the fudged traffic model and number of people and freight going nowhere was reminding me of something and I couldn't think of what...but it's the Victoria II launch.
Everything looking fine on the surface, and seeming to work for the first however-many years, long enough for reviewers to tick all the boxes and give it its 8/10. But then people started reporting that later in the game everything would start crashing down with constant financial collapses and endless waves of marauding revolutionaries. Turns out the industrial revolution created all this extra supply of goods and population growth was nowhere near enough to keep demand up in a similar fashion. So rather than working out a real solution, they fudged it by just giving factory workers ludicrously high basic needs (like 50x higher than everyone else) to increase demand and soak up these new goods. These needs could never be met and they'd spiral into constant revolution. And it's such a hugely complex and unguided economic system that fixing the fudge factor messes with everything else and makes it all collapse some different way. All sorts of other problems under the hood as well that had just been thinly plastered-over (mass artisan suicide etc). So kinda a similar bitten-off-more-complexity-than-they-can-chew issue. Seemed like it might be just about unfixably broken at a fundamental level, and it took a loooong time to fix it all up, but it's a lot better now (especially with mods).
So you never know, these SimCity fudges could perhaps be fixed in time, but I imagine that in the short-term any sort of "quick fix" is likely to break things worse than they already are. And it's probably the sort of issues that require seriously dedicated time and effort and iterative updating to tighten up all the game's various systems - like you get from Paradox and their modders, and which I'm not sure you'd get from EA. And it seems like at least some of the fudges are for the sake of limited processing power, and maybe can't ever be fixed.
Everything looking fine on the surface, and seeming to work for the first however-many years, long enough for reviewers to tick all the boxes and give it its 8/10. But then people started reporting that later in the game everything would start crashing down with constant financial collapses and endless waves of marauding revolutionaries. Turns out the industrial revolution created all this extra supply of goods and population growth was nowhere near enough to keep demand up in a similar fashion. So rather than working out a real solution, they fudged it by just giving factory workers ludicrously high basic needs (like 50x higher than everyone else) to increase demand and soak up these new goods. These needs could never be met and they'd spiral into constant revolution. And it's such a hugely complex and unguided economic system that fixing the fudge factor messes with everything else and makes it all collapse some different way. All sorts of other problems under the hood as well that had just been thinly plastered-over (mass artisan suicide etc). So kinda a similar bitten-off-more-complexity-than-they-can-chew issue. Seemed like it might be just about unfixably broken at a fundamental level, and it took a loooong time to fix it all up, but it's a lot better now (especially with mods).
So you never know, these SimCity fudges could perhaps be fixed in time, but I imagine that in the short-term any sort of "quick fix" is likely to break things worse than they already are. And it's probably the sort of issues that require seriously dedicated time and effort and iterative updating to tighten up all the game's various systems - like you get from Paradox and their modders, and which I'm not sure you'd get from EA. And it seems like at least some of the fudges are for the sake of limited processing power, and maybe can't ever be fixed.
Marla_Singer
United in diversity
If by good games you mean creative games inventing new concepts and driving them well, I share the same feeling. At least there seems to be a trend.
Though majors of the industry are fortunately still able to produce great games, but they do so using already known formulas.
Maniacal
the green Napoleon
So, it turns out a lot of the game is coded in Javascript. Now I'm no programmer, but that sounds rather amateurish to me.
Leonel
Breakfast Connoisseur
I'm guessing that's the thing where they had initially said you could mod the game.
Maniacal
the green Napoleon
Yeah, so far the modding seems to largely use the debug console too, which it seems EA ninja-patched so people couldn't use it (although you could use it to grief other players and cheat).
JavaScript?
Don't professional game engines use C++/C# either straight or with Python/Lua?
Do you have a source for that as it would be interesting to see what they are using it for? Presumably they are using a javascript library like jquery which improves javascript quite a lot by dramatically reducing the amount of code that is necessary and its very useful in web development.
It sounds a bit weird for a game to use it but if parts of the game are acting like a website then something like javascript could be appropriate.
It sounds a bit weird for a game to use it but if parts of the game are acting like a website then something like javascript could be appropriate.
Maniacal
the green Napoleon
Its from the reddit posts from people digging through the game's code, debug menu and trying to mod it.
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