SimCity 5

[Symphony D.]

From the latest patch notes:

• Tuning: Residential-only cities have failure state.

Underlying issues? What are those? Just add a check for a certain state to cause a failure cascade!

From the SA thread:

Guillaume posted some follow-up to his twitter. Increased low-wealth density will now require water and power (I thought it did already), low taxes will provide less happiness and crucially, things like fires, garbage, and building abandonment will be enabled based on tax money collected + gift money collected, whereas now it only looks at tax money collected.

Poop and fire are products of the socialist welfare state in Simtopia.

 

[PieceOfMind]

Are there plans to include textures for the buildings?

I think so, but from what I saw in a google+ conversation about it, the option will remain to have the 'plastic' looking buildings too, sort of as a data layer I suppose.

 

[Symphony D.]

Patch 2.0 is an abysmal failure, r/SimCity despairs.

 

[trader/warrior]

The most ridiculous part is that this "MMO" still has no proper way to actually find multiplayer games. Apparently their servers can't even handle a damn map filter to find yourself a "massive" 16 player server...

 

[cybrxkhan]

One of my friends said that this whole mess would only last a week and after that everything would be relatively fine.

I thought he had a good point, more or less (though I thought more like one month rather than one week).



I see that we were proven very wrong.

 

[civ_king]

One of my friends said that this whole mess would only last a week and after that everything would be relatively fine.

I thought he had a good point, more or less (though I thought more like one month rather than one week).



I see that we were proven very wrong.

I guessed up to one year after seeing the first few days play out, might be expecting too much.

 

[civvver]

They suckered everyone into prepaying for it, those who are waiting at this point won't buy even if they fix the severs, what incentive is there to bust ass and fix it now vs 6 months from now? They fix it in six months, do a price drop to $30 and I'll bet a lot of people try it then.

 

[Symphony D.]

SimCity's agents are a realistic method of simulating real life actors.


Link to video.

 

[JtheJackal]

I really wanted this game, but they clearly did not deliver what they said they would.

 

[cybrxkhan]

Trying to think about this objectively, how bad are the bugs during SimCity's release compared to those during, say, Skyrim's release? I've heard some SimCity apologists compare the two, but I was never under the impression that Skyrim was completely unplayable when it just came out, but maybe someone here who has some experience with both can tell me more (since I bought Skyrim a few months after it was released, I don't know to what extent its bugs were).

EDIT: Obviously Skyrim doesn't have DRM and fudged statistics and some of the other issues SimCity has, but I'm talking mainly about the bugs.

 

[Chairman Meow]

I ended up not buying SimCity, and instead spent some of the money I would have spent on it buying Kerbal Space Program instead. The more I hear about SimCity and the more I play KSP, the happier I am with that decision.

SimCity's agents are a realistic method of simulating real life actors.

youtube

What, the garbage trucks where you live don't undergo mitosis?

 

[Leonel]

Trying to think about this objectively, how bad are the bugs during SimCity's release compared to those during, say, Skyrim's release? I've heard some SimCity apologists compare the two, but I was never under the impression that Skyrim was completely unplayable when it just came out, but maybe someone here who has some experience with both can tell me more (since I bought Skyrim a few months after it was released, I don't know to what extent its bugs were).

EDIT: Obviously Skyrim doesn't have DRM and fudged statistics and some of the other issues SimCity has, but I'm talking mainly about the bugs.

For the reputation Bethesda has with bugs, I never got the impression that Skyrim had any bugs. It played perfectly fine for me and the only bugs came from conflicting mods I installed.

 

[civ_king]

Trying to think about this objectively, how bad are the bugs during SimCity's release compared to those during, say, Skyrim's release? I've heard some SimCity apologists compare the two, but I was never under the impression that Skyrim was completely unplayable when it just came out, but maybe someone here who has some experience with both can tell me more (since I bought Skyrim a few months after it was released, I don't know to what extent its bugs were).

EDIT: Obviously Skyrim doesn't have DRM and fudged statistics and some of the other issues SimCity has, but I'm talking mainly about the bugs.

Skyrim was quite playable on release, I only encoutered the Solitude execution bug.

 

[trader/warrior]

Trying to think about this objectively, how bad are the bugs during SimCity's release compared to those during, say, Skyrim's release? I've heard some SimCity apologists compare the two, but I was never under the impression that Skyrim was completely unplayable when it just came out, but maybe someone here who has some experience with both can tell me more (since I bought Skyrim a few months after it was released, I don't know to what extent its bugs were).

EDIT: Obviously Skyrim doesn't have DRM and fudged statistics and some of the other issues SimCity has, but I'm talking mainly about the bugs.

In my very subjective opinion, the bugs aren't actually that bad, the gameplay is just inherently bad and flawed.

For example, while traffic is a pain and often unintuitive, an awful lot of the "OMG TARFICK IS UNPOSSIBLE AND BUGGED!" and people building ridiculous looking road systems because they claim anything else will not function more often than not simply suck at traffic management or have missed some important techniques. And this problem is compunded by the lack of track/road/transit possibilities sacrificed to the god of streamlining and simplification (edit: And in fact I think SC5 is a perfect example of how simplification can result in more headaches because of less flexibility).

I got the game at releasewallbash and stopped playing after a couple of days, the multitude of bugs were very noticable, but for me none really game-breaking. It's just that the game is crap.

And I think the Glassbox engine was a huge mistake. The agent system looked so cool in concept, but the simplistic way they act is causing an awful lot of issues and bad gameplay, some of which it seems can never be fixed.

Overall bugginess, ignoring server/DRM issues I'd still say SC5 was at least slightly worse than Skyrim. And mind that I am usually less angered by bugs than other people.

 

[SouthernKing]

...and the SimTrainwreck saga continues. Not that it isn't damned entertaining to watch, of course.

 

[Symphony D.]

The comparison to Skyrim is hilariously fallacious because the game fulfilled its core gameplay objectives at launch and was supported with patches for almost a year and a half up until a few weeks ago. It was fundamentally an open-world sandbox game and questline bugs don't really affect that.

SimCity does neither of those things. It is irredeemably bad. Covering for it is Stocholm Syndrome at best. I don't even own it and I'm in this for the trainwreck, and I can tell you that.

 

[J-man]

Yesterday EA announced the Sims 4, expected to be released in 2014. Look at this interesting bit of their press release:

The Sims 4 celebrates the heart and soul of the Sims themselves, giving players a deeper connection with the most expressive, surprising and charming Sims ever in this single-player offline experience.

I thought that EVERY EA game needed to have multi-player? Or perhaps EA did learn a lesson?

http://www.ea.com/news/the-sims-4-in-development-for-pc-and-mac

 

[cybrxkhan]

They've also announced a third major patch for SimCity. Wonder how that'll work out.

 

[Symphony D.]

It won't. RCI is fundamentally broken. Agents are fundamentally broken. The game, as coded, does not work. It certainly will do things in time, but it does not work. To make it work, they would need to start over—from scratch. It's not happening. Anyone who has notions that this game might ever be functional is deluded.

 

[civ_king]

It won't. RCI is fundamentally broken. Agents are fundamentally broken. The game, as coded, does not work. It certainly will do things in time, but it does not work. To make it work, they would need to start over—from scratch. It's not happening. Anyone who has notions that this game might ever be functional is deluded.

Having studied algorithms I have become convinced that to make Glassbox the way they wanted to is at least 10 years down the line in terms of hardware.