Wow, that's rather unexpected. Glad they are listening to their customers, though.
The new SimCity...*sigh*
- Thread starter Sheep
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The game has still the most major flaw.. tiny areas where you can built a suburb at best and it doesn't look like they're willing to enlarge the area.
So still absolutely no buy from me which makes me quite sad as i love the Sim City series.
Edit:
http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/01/14/maxis-simcity-online-opposition-was-clear-ahead-of-launch
Article on Ign.com about the failures of Sim City
Best parts?
And then fucked up the release royally
We have fucked up the game by designing and programming it like true amateurs and have taken ages before giving up claiming it can't be changed (and near instantly proven wrong by the modders).
Now that we have given up we are acting like we're making a gift to the community by allowing Mods in the hope better programmers might fix our mess (for free of course) and the game will climb out of opinion hell.
I don't know if i should act surprised at the sheer disingenuity of these statements by EA officials and i really do hope they learned from this fiasco. If they ever decide to make another Sim City i hope they get someone good at the helm who understands the core of the game and is able to keep the moneyhungry side of EA at bay long enough to deliver a playable game.
So still absolutely no buy from me which makes me quite sad as i love the Sim City series.
Edit:
http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/01/14/maxis-simcity-online-opposition-was-clear-ahead-of-launch
Article on Ign.com about the failures of Sim City
Best parts?
So the former general manager is now senior vice president of EA, i guess it really is true that some people tend to fail upwards
So they knew that fans were less than enthusiastic (to put it mildly) about the online design choice but continued anyway because customers opinion? Who cares...
And then fucked up the release royally
Translation:
We have fucked up the game by designing and programming it like true amateurs and have taken ages before giving up claiming it can't be changed (and near instantly proven wrong by the modders).
Now that we have given up we are acting like we're making a gift to the community by allowing Mods in the hope better programmers might fix our mess (for free of course) and the game will climb out of opinion hell.
I don't know if i should act surprised at the sheer disingenuity of these statements by EA officials and i really do hope they learned from this fiasco. If they ever decide to make another Sim City i hope they get someone good at the helm who understands the core of the game and is able to keep the moneyhungry side of EA at bay long enough to deliver a playable game.
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I've enjoyed the Sim City series through the original to 4. But the latest one hasn't taken my fancy. It sounds as if they have realised there mistake, both on-line games have their pros and cons. Perhaps an idea for next time would be to make it an off-line game first, with an online feature. After all if city size is an issue you just have off-line mode where you can build a Megaloplis and an on-line mode where you are restricted to a smaller size.
I'd say Cities XL has taken the crown in this particular genre, anyway. Much better game.
Sadly, I think this debacle is going to hurt the chances of us seeing a new SimCity game for some time. EA didn't appear to be interested in making a new SimCity game for a long time after SC4 (not counting Societies), and when they finally decided to give it another shot they loaded it with a bunch of unpopular policies that led to a PR nighmare for them. I'd like to think that they'd learn from their mistakes with this title and release the SimCity game that fans have been waiting a decade for, but they'll probably just send Maxis back to making The Sims DLC as that's a safer bet for the company.
I like an interview IGN had with the developers and they are like "We would have added offline sooner, but we had problems with the servers that needed to be dealt with".
And I'm like "Hello! If you had offline to begin with there would have been server issues!!!"
And I'm like "Hello! If you had offline to begin with there would have been server issues!!!"
Yeah, it really sounds like this game was poorly thought out. It sounds to me like the size of the cities and the performance of the game is more due to how much the game would have to process through the servers for it to be an online game, something that I doubt would even be much of an issue if it were an offline game.
I assume you mean there wouldn't have been server issues.
However, I think your perspective is ignoring the realities of game development. It's obvious that online play was meant to be a key feature of this game. An offline mode was a lower priority. It would have made no sense at all to complete the offline mode if that meant delaying the online mode, when the latter was intended as a key attraction for the title.
Of course, the online piece was totally screwed, too, so they delivered what was a fundamentally broken product, in terms of both how it was meant to work and what most fans of the series expected.
I think, while stability was a huge issue, city size was always a large one too. That one is unrelated to the DRM. My guess is it's related to the under the hood individualized Sim part that's supposed to be more realistic. But you can't play that part and it leads to a less enjoyable experience because of how small the cities are. That's something that probably needed to be addressed before release - perhaps in the design stage.
Yeah, definitely. I think that in single-player, the smaller city size could have maybe been designed as sort of villages that are played individually, forming a bigger city as it grows, similar to burroughs or hamlets, etc.
Like SimCity4? Each city was part of a grid, so when you ran out of room in one city you could begin building in the neighbouring city and feel like you were working on a single giant city. That would have been a decent workaround for the small city sizes, but for some reason they chose to space them out across the regions with nothing but wilderness dividing them.
Something like that, and in a sense, the different player cities sort of amount to that, I guess, since you do end up sharing resources. But they've made the small city size too definitive through game mechanics. Through the logic of Simcity, it doesn't seem like the cities really progress beyond being a small village, and that's a shame. Ironically, I think if they'd have found a way to make bigger cities, they could have had player cities join up to become one large city, all working together with different specialized resources. So you'd go from people being mayors, to regional councillors with a chance of being elected mayor for a certain amount of time. In this way, they could have factored out a more socially engaging game.
Maybe i'll buy it after all now. I could care less about playing SimCity with other people online. A buddy i work with has it. He likes it a lot but says when the cities get large he say the city tends to "fall apart" and cave in on itself. Any light on this?
Bit of a bump, but this news is the capstone that completes the SimCity debacle: EA is shutting down the studio behind the game. It looks like the SimCity series is probably dead for another decade. 
Yeah, they'd not been doing well for a while.
As a bit of good news for city-building fans, Cities Skylines is coming out soon and, from everything I've heard, it's quite good. It's from the same folks who made the Cities in Motion games.
As a bit of good news for city-building fans, Cities Skylines is coming out soon and, from everything I've heard, it's quite good. It's from the same folks who made the Cities in Motion games.
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I liked SimCity 4, but 3000 is still my preferred SC game.
SC4 was a lot better than the polished turd this thread is about!
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