Joiiin uss

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Boosting this quality contribution up in the Hot Listing - declared quality by UsesProzac.

Oh boy.

It's astonishing how EA/Maxis not only try to control every single aspect of your gaming experience, but also fuck it up in the process.

Meanwhile, Bohemia Interactive actively encourage their customers to mess around with the Arma 3 engine at their hearts' content and empower them to create several lifetimes worth of content for free. Hell, it's just an alpha version and already people are creating entirely new features -- and BI happily integrate them into the main build.

Watch and learn, EA. Watch and learn.

Strange I could have watched that a lot longer. I was in a weird trance!

Wow looks like fun!!

Well yeah, you're practically begging for a pedestrian hurricane by putting a plaza at the end of a high density avenue. Every urban planner knows that.

Yeah, the whole simcity saga has really taken a downturn. A lot of the negative press has been on the always on DRM and the conflicting reports of how "hard" it would be to turn it off when its already been disabled by a few users.

The focus should move towards this and actual gameplay problems. The traffic issues are really bad as well with sims making really retarded driving decisions. Not to mention that the population count isnt accurate, as well as the problems with "not enough workers" even after people have built entire cities with nothing but residential zoning. There are still endless bugs, like streetcars disappearing or casino towns not being viable thanks to tourist problems.

The whole DRM issue seems strange to me because its like arguing that a poorly designed game has DRM and not the other way around. The game does work well at times but it seems that the whole "agent" system they use that starts to make the game fun at the same time seems to cause problems and take away from the fun.

I agree. To me, the DRM really isn't the biggest gameplay problem. I'm tired of having problems crop up like "worker shortage, zone more residential to get more workers" when there's NO ROOM LEFT IN MY POSTAGE-STAMP SIZED CITY. Seriously, DRM and server issues aside, the biggest problem for me is the playable area in each city. Problems like these cannot be solved within your own city's limits, yet when I start a "dormitory town" to supply workers, they always complain about unemployment. I should be able to fix these problems in the same city they crop up in. The traffic pathfinding system is seriously broken too. Emergency vehicles don't even try to get past other traffic!

Needs more wayward rollercoasters.

This is not a bug, its the new Apple Store building unit! http://www.tuaw.com/media/2006/05/timelapsenyc.jpg

Just like army ants!

Flash mob

I'd say this is a perfectly realistic simulation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCAvorxz7Hw

@FlowersInHisHair @aimpoint. In my opinion there are two major issues that caused the game/launch to be such a disaster. I am not speaking of technical reasons or gameplay, which are solvable through patches and more game servers. I'm speaking of the one thing you can't change and thats the first impression.

First of all, they advertised the game wrong. They focused on the glass box engine, the general look and in the early stages made it look just like a very good reboot of the series. But old fans of franchise don't get you that many new customers. So they jumped on the social game train, in hopes of acquiring a new set of potential customers. In my opinion there is nothing wrong with that. Players who just wanted to play the game on their own could do just so, just like players who want to build a huge city together with their Facebook friends. At least this was what the marketing made us believe. In hindsight they should have marketed the whole game as some kind of sim city online. Which would have set the right expectations into customers and prevented a part of the huge shitstorm that followed.

Secondly, and this rule should be written in caps, DON'T LIE! Or at least DON'T GET CAUGHT LYING! If you say it needs always on DRM, you better make sure your game only works online.

Saying that DRM is the reason of the Sim City debacle would be very far from the truth. Sure there is a love-hate relationship between players and publishers, especially regarding DRM. But in the end of the day the urge to play the game is bigger than the personal objections against the "evil" publisher.

Because to be honest, this is neither the first game to have an always-online DRM, nor is it the first to have server issues after the launch, nor is it the first game that wasn't as bug free as the user might wish. After that being said, in my opinion firing EA's CEO (which happened this monday) was damage control at the wrong end, they should have sacked the whole PR department.

Taking the term "bug" literally: humans really are all just ants.

HOLY SHIT! What IS that??? Is.. is that a bug?? A computer game... with a real BUG?! OMFG... this has got to be a FIRST! I mean, I've been gaming for nearly 30 years and I've owned thousands of titles, but I don't know if I've EVER seen one with a REAL bug before!!!!!!!

This is monumental! This is... EPIC! This is....

...stupid.

So, you found a bug in SimCity. Whoop-de-freakin-do. Just because of all the media sensation surrounding the failed launch, this otherwise simple (yet amusing) bug is being hailed as some kind of incredible evidence that the Glassbox engine is somehow complete crap, right? Oh, okay, I get it now.

Yes, no OTHER developer has ever released bugs in their games. Yes, ooooh, let's all marvel at the bug that makes Sims walk around in circles under some special circumstances that are not even revealed to the rest of us. I play SimCity, and I play it a lot. I've never seen this happen. Not saying it's rigged, or that it doesn't happen to other players or anything, but after nearly 100 hours of playing and a dozen or so cities built, I've never seen this bug myself. Just sayin'.

Wtf. It's not really the bugs that are the main problem. It's the deliberate gameplay and design choices that they've made that are hampering the game. Bugs we can forgive.

I don't care about the first impression, because I already have the game. What I want is for them to fix the traffic pathfinding problems and allow larger city sizes. And make disasters optional. And have offline saves. Fixing the game is what I'm interested in, not damage limitation from the disastrous launch. I don't give a toss about EA's PR department.

I just wanted to point out that the whole sim city launch is not worse than for example the diablo launch, what made it look much worse was the way EA handled the situation.

Also, nobody forced you to buy the game. Problems like the restricted city size or the pathfinding were pointed out by many players who had access to the beta. And you can find these issues in almost every serious review to sim city, so it's not like you didn't have the chance to know that before you bought the game.

Yes I didn't have to buy the game (people keep saying that, as if it's news) but the point is I have bought the game. Look, I was in the beta. It was so limited (you could only play for an hour at a time before having to restart, and most gameplay features were unavailable to test) that it was practically useless for determining how the game would actually work on release. I assumed the small city sizes were limited for the beta too. All the things I'm griping about are fixable post-release, and that's what I'm hoping for. My point is, and always has been, that I don't really care about the PR disaster side of things, or the server problems. At least not half as much as I care about the post-release patches that the game now needs.

Those Occupy Wallstreet guys have got to be stopped! This is getting ridiculous!

All of the regular information sources were pointing at a failed DRM launch. Looking to beta sources can only get you so far, beta is a beta. Whose to say that a "bug" isn't a "feature". After playing the game for a bit, I can see that much of the "first impressions" done by reviewers who looked passed the DRM still didn't uncover some of the real underlying problems and instead were stuck on problems where there was a lack of understanding.
Example; Often the focus would be on things like "I have enough power, yet my buildings arent getting powered". Took me a little while to figure out that each building has a capacity that needs to get filled before it will stop sucking up power from the grid and allowing further buildings down the electrical grid to take in power.
I bought the game knowing I could live past most of the problems presented. (I play mostly on off-peak hours and my play style meant that it would take about 3-4 hours before I came close to maxing out the size of the city, compared to the commonly reported 1 hour)

I enjoyed the game for a while, it was a new and different type of simcity. But after a while, once the understanding of the mechanics settled in, there is an inherent problem with how the current game is running. It goes back to the original point of not enough focus on the actual game, even if the DRM, marketing mishaps, and community backlash/suppression is ignored.

@aimpoint @FlowersInHisHair Ok, it's hard for me to argue against faulty gameplay. Maybe I'm just a cynical bastard, but after what I saw in the beta I was pretty sure they would fuck this game up (from the perspective of a fan of the series). It's just how modern industry works, EA was trying to get a huge new user base, so they made the game more appealing to casual users. By doing that, it was almost inevitable to fuck up for the old fans of sim city. When I heard that you only need about an hour to fill the city space, I was goddamn sure they fucked up. It's now this game for the typical call of duty player, who doesn't want to put to much thought in his projects, all that matters is that his city looks good. If I remember correctly, I had to start Sim City 4 over and over again before I learned how to build a city.

I'm not saying EA couldn't do otherwise. For example this is the same thing I thought modern game industry would do to X-Com, but Firaxis did a wonderful Job reinventing the series and they brought a new simpler aspect into turn-based strategy. It also had some really frustrating bugs (especially if you played with only one save game) they fixed up later... But since this is EA (I don't say maxis for a reason, because they are part of EA) I wouldn't bet a penny that they fix all these issues, at least not for free. I would predict that in about halve a year you'll see the "Bigger Cities" DLC for 5-20 $.