f13.net

EA have announced SimCity, the latest edition of the SimCity franchise. I guess it should be called SimCity 5 but they've decided to reboot the franchise by doing away with the numbers. It's nine years since SimCity 4, so why not.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T70evBJE93s

From the launch video, it looks like they are focusing more on letting players place specific buildings than the traditional method of creating zones and hoping buildings appear in them. Edit: Or maybe not, other videos do show zoning.

It will be possible to customise your cities - making an entertainment mecca or manufacturing powerbase, for example - and there will be a strong multiplayer aspect. This apparently includes the ability to sabotage neighbouring cities by pouring out pollution, for example. It's not clear if there will be an offline option too.

From the look of the video, you'll actually be able to see neighbouring cities on the map, in as much detail as your own city, and watch them grow while you're building your own. It looks like fun to me.

http://www.simcity.com/

Edit: Wait, you guys are discussing this in the Origin thread already. Well, it deserves its own thread;)

Indeed.


And /thread

:oh_i_see:

How dare they inform potential customers about different price models for a product.  

Wait, what?  People are actually complaining about the fact that a business is acting like a business and offering more things for more money?  

It's the costs, not that they're different.

60 Euros is roughly $80 and 80 Euros is about $105, just to put a finer point on things.

As long as publishers keep hosing Europe with batshit insane pricing people will keep bitching about it, even if that pricing is now the norm.

I was excited about this until I realized EA.  Just not dealing with Origin, so an easy decision.

Yeah, that price, combined with the day 0 DLC and EA/Origin?

No thanks.

There's four (one (http://www.hardwareclips.com/video/7183/Sim-City-5-Inside-the-GlassBoxEngine-gfx-not-final-1of4), two (http://www.hardwareclips.com/video/7186/Sim-City-5-Inside-the-GlassBoxEngine-gfx-not-final-2of4), three (http://www.hardwareclips.com/video/7187/Sim-City-Inside-the-GlassBoxEngine-gfx-not-final-3of4), four (http://www.hardwareclips.com/video/7188/Sim-City-Inside-the-GlassBoxEngine-gfx-not-final-4of4)) videos from GDC up on some German site.

It seems like they're fundamentally changing the underlying mechanics of the game to arrive at similar gameplay. As opposed to a connectivity/static pathing model, they're going for almost a pure agent/heatmap implementation with lots of graphical indicators of the various data. The limited resource system also looks intriguing.

Still early days yet, but I think this is going to be a very interesting reboot. It seems very faithful to the basic ideas of the older SimCity games. Ocean Quigley is the Creative Director, which gives me quite a bit of hope. He's worked on SimCity things as far back as SC2k.

I'm not sure if I like the idea of placing individual buildings. Watching people move in and having your city build itself was half the fun for me playing this game.

In any case, I'll wait and see about buying it. Simcity 4 was basically unplayable for me at release and I vowed never to get sucked in again.

EA are just doing their bit to ensure the survival of software piracy.

You aren't entitled to Limited or Deluxe editions, if you don't like the price don't pay it and just get the regular box.

WTF!!!  You mean I can't get a BMW M3 with all the extras for the same price as the bare bones 3 series?  OPPRESSION!!!  RIOT!!!

I'm pretty sure not getting the Super Hero HQ in your little digital building game counts as a first world problem.

The engine videos show a player placing a zone, and the zone growing buildings, just like in the traditional SimCity titles. I think individual-placement remains as the placement mechanic for special buildings, like fire stations and schools. They also imply that you can add "upgrades" to these sorts of special buildings, e.g. plopping extra towers on top of a fire station to make it .. more... fire-station-y. Presumably they make it better somehow.

So, individual buildings als DLC doesn't seem like a money grab to you Murgos?

I agree that the only way is to vote with your money and not buying the game. But you make it sound like these are reasonable distinctions between the editions.

EA now is at the point where they complete a game and pull out features to sell extra from the completed game. What will be their excuse this time? "Crime waves weren't completed when the game went gold, so we had to make it a DLC."

Seriously?

And super hero hq. And evil villain lair. And british city set. And french. And german. :oh_i_see:

Of course it's a money grab.  So?  Don't buy it.  You don't have to have it.

e: by 'it' I mean one of the enhanced editions.  You don't need to have those things it comes with to still enjoy the game.  Not having them doesn't make the rest of the game worth less or not function.

Problem is you also have to say why you don't buy it. Because otherwise its just "Sales going down due to evil Pirates" instead of "Sales going down because we are douchebags".

Very cool stuff.

Don't kid yourself, it'll still be "sales going down due to evil pirates".

It's almost as if we live in a capitalist society.

Fucking hippies.

It's cute you think the price of 'regular box' is going to be lower than that of "limited edition".

I mean srsly, EA.

Typically, yeah, limited editions are more than the regular price.  But even if EA is playing word games and the Limited Edition is the regular box, so what?  If it costs more than you are comfortable with, again, don't buy it.

You are not entitled to a video game, sorry.

But people are absolutely entitled to complain about what they consider to be exorbitant pricing.

It's called feedback, and it's something most companies do well to at least listen to.

They're too busy scrooge-diving into the mounds of dolla dollas they'll get.

The "limited edition" is simply the normal box given some of the DLC as a bonus for pre-ordering.

Nobody (as far as I know) really cares too much about the USD pricing for the game, which is $60 normal / $80 Deluxe. The gripes come in when the game is priced at 60€, which is not comparable in the slightest to $60. It's not about entitlement, it's about wanting fair pricing, which Europe has been getting screwed out of for far too long.

Iirc, typically, as far as EA games are concerned, "limited edition" is the buzzword they slap on pre-orders to imply artificial scarcity. The content and pricing at best doesn't change, and more typically you are actually asked to pay extra if you want the same 'bonus' bits they put in the pre-order package, when buying 'regular' game after launch date.

For one, it renders your "if you don't like this, buy the cheaper regular version" argument false. If as result you have to change it to "if you don't like the price then don't buy it, period" then it becomes meaningless, as you offer this wisdom to people who state precisely that -- that they won't buy the game as result of too aggressive, in their opinion, pricing.

Awesome.  Yes, zipper head, if the meaning of limited edition changes from 'thing you pay extra for to get special stuff' to mean 'pre-order bonus' then the context of the conversation changes.

The 'if you don't like the price don't play it' message still applies to those who seem to think EA's pricing is a justification for piracy or that somehow a price in the US implies that something should convert equally to another currency at the current [instantaneous] exchange rate.  Neither point is true.
 

Actually expecting a currency to act as a medium of exchange is sort of its point. Putting on an extra margin just because you can is gouging, which is repugnant but legal, as is working around it through buying a US copy. Though thanks to the US working around gouging enabling mechanisms may not be (ie region locking).

It's still completely pointless "message" to give in the context.

"It's too expensive for me so i won't be buying it"
"If it's too expensive for you then don't buy it"

honestly, duh?

Also, maybe it's not about exchange rates but about simple fact that prices hiked up ~30% wind up as simply too much for some to swallow regardless of whether someone else is fortunate enough to pay less? Perhaps we'll find out when EA tries to regularly charge 85-105 USD for their games on the other side of the pond.

This isn't new, steam does this all the time, both the exchange rate and the "limited edition" (because that's the publisher's demands or something, I don't care). Then again, steam does sales, so it kind of evens out.

But zipperhead? Really?

Is that a bad word? And why for all our non native English speakers

Looks pretty enough, but I can't help shake the feeling - based on the wank-speak the marketing arm have employed so far - that it'lll be a simplified SimCity 4 (which wasn't difficult anyway) built for social networking gameplay. I don't want to compete on MyBook or FaceSpace for nebulous achievements; I want a city builder where I'm resolving 6-way highway interchanges and issuing preservation orders for the historic crappy 1st-iteration buildings down on the waterfront. Otherwise it's just an overpriced screensaver.

Since steam only does what the publishers demand why mention it? Especially since the majority of steam games are at USD price.

Though it is pretty amusing when a game shows up on steam at straight conversion and then suddenly jumps when they remember the internet is global. That said I mostly blame local retail protecting their margins more than EA, though I'm sure they are happy to shrug and pocket their cut.

Racial slur, means Asian. Kinda like gook, chink, etc. I'm sure Murgos didn't mean it like that and was probably just unaware that's what it meant.

I'm mentioning it because steam used to use dollars initially, but moved over to euro and didn't adjust the price down to match, so it was a straight hike. Bitching where bitching is due, and I'm seeing Origin as something EA is going to try to make into a future content delivery service competing directly with steam.

But you say "are at USD price: they're not really, are they?
Wargame: European Escalation: €40
The Sims 3: €45
The Sims 3 - Showtime: €35

etc.

Supposedly the name for koreans or asians, coined after the tiremarks the american jeeps made when running them over.

But it wasn't the word itself (I don't really give a fuck about that), it was more the fact that it was an insult against the person, instead of trying to keep the discussion civil.

I don't think that anyone's claiming that other companies don't also price gouge. But this thread is about Sim City, so I think it's fair for people to complain about 0 day DLC and what they feel are the excessive prices announced for said Sim City game.

Personally I think that AAA games are too expensive and that this contributes to piracy. For myself it means that I very, very rarely buy games on release but wait some months until they're cheaper. It also means I'm more likely to buy cheap indy games on Steam since I don't feel aggrieved at spending £10 or so to see if a game is any good. €60 / £50 for a digital download seems exorbitant to me.

Agree 100% about unnecessary use of insults, wasn't defending it, just saying I didn't think he was a racist :)

I can get SimCity 4 on Steam for $5 during a sale.  There really isn't that much added to this one to justify the price difference.

I think we're all just accustomed to the good old days when a game came out, it was good, and if it was really good, it'd get patched or maybe even get an expansion.  While I like the idea that DLC replaces the need for a fully thought out and developed expansion pack, I disagree with having content that was developed at the same time as the original game and then cut out to be resold as DLC after the game comes out.  This is EA's strategy now; they ask themselves and their dev teams, "Just how much can we cut up this game to give a decent experience to most and make more profit by selling some of the bits at a premium?"  Combined with going into self-solitary confinement by only selling their games online through their own store, and manipulation of the brick 'n mortar stores, this is where the EA hate comes about these days.  It's no longer about a company that turned into "The Borg" of the industry by buying up everyone and rebranding them (though that's still a sore wound to many old-timers), it's about that company now saying "We've got enough talent, we don't need to assimilate anyone else.  You'll buy from us, you'll buy the DLC if you want the complete experience, or you can GTFO."

At this point, I have no problem with GTFO.  I'd much rather pay indy devs and other companies that don't treat their customers like mindless drones.  The problem is that, indeed, EA has grown to the point where they don't 'need' anyone else...they don't need Steam, D2D, GOG or others to survive.  Unless they just straight shoot themselves in the foot something fierce, this is just the way of things now.

And that is a pity, because I'm sort of getting the feeling that they're adding a lot of subtle things through the simulation of everything, that it would be worth, say, €40, if it was the whole thing, and was available on steam.

Oh well. It's not like they'll starve anyways, there are most likely more than enough people who aren't as bitter as we are.

Huh, seems this is multiplayer. (http://www.giantbomb.com/news/here-are-a-bunch-of-random-details-for-maxis-new-simcity/4023/)

Playing simcity 4 made me feel the whole game is a capsule from another time. Find a green plain and just plop down nukes and freeways so your urban slums can start developing. And you'd better plan on spending a lot of time playing with roads because that's an inescapable part of a city. There's lots of demand (and resources) for whatever you are making in your smokey factories and trying to restrain growth leads to failure and slums.

It would be really fun to have something like, "Sim City: Bright Future" where you can start exploring different models for future cities. Alternative energy, transport modes (track carbon use), population control and the mechanics and policies to allow you to adjust the type of city you have. It would also solve the problem that all the sim-city mechanics seemed to only have one path of development and the challenge was how closely you could track their envisioned evolution.

... but it's from EA, so I expect it to be shinier, linked into facebook and have lots of DLC available now on origin.

Still, it encouraged me to finally download tropico. Gives me the urge to build something.

Wat.

I think he is saying he's a giant hippy nerd.

And wants to start a eugenics program.

I get that.  But, umm, a good chunk of that shit has been in the game since at least SC2k.  Pollution, nuclear energy, and rail has been in since the 1989 version.

I was so terrible at SimCity 2k. Yet it is the game that made me start looking at city builders.

Never played SimCity 4, though, I had other games occupying me at the time and I just never got around to it.

SimCity 4 Deluxe is $9.99 on Origin right now, btw. http://store.origin.com/store/ea/en_US/pd/productID.198095500/sac.true

It's 10 euro on steam (should be 10 usd in america I suppose?)

Nope, still $19.99 on Steam here.  Which is unfortunate, because I've managed to avoid Origin thus far, and I'd like to keep it that way.  On the other hand, this thread has reawakened my latent Sim City compulsion.   Hmm...

Steam has it on sale quite frequently for $5.  Just wait for that and you get it cheaper without Origin.

I still take a crack at it every once in a while.  The game still runs oddly slowly, or at least LOOKS slow - I guess the animations were never meant to be super smooth.  I never really get further than one sort-of-decent section and one garbage/power neighbor section and then I lose interest.  I was terrible at SimCity the First, though.

Pollution is a lot different from having a slider marked "carbon tax" or ceiling and having to mess with different models of a city to meet it as a victory condition. Similarly their power model is pretty much just plop down a coal power somewhere you don't care about or a nuclear power plant once you can afford it and the problem is solved. Have a scenario where the citizens refuse to live with a nuke on the map or pollution and see what's possible with alternative energy. Have a scenario were they leash the sims ability to travel from their home to represent fuel constraints and you can't just lay freeways everywhere. And the growth goals are almost always purely growth rather than anything involving quality of life or different styles of city.

Yes, I'm probably a hippy (and it's much more complex to design) but simCity is pretty much always about building the same city, and probably a city from the 60's. It would be more interesting if it was a tool for thinking about what future cities might be like and how future technologies and constraints will influence urban planning.

This.

Now, where'd I put that golf disc?

You are right, name calling was uncalled for, I was just feeling annoyed and snarky.  And no, I wasn't aware of the ethnic overtones.

Regardless costs do not directly translate across borders though, taxes, fees and any number of other agreements, arrangements and commercial realities of doing business affect the price.

I can go to two stores across the street from each other and get two different prices for the same item.  It's really not realistic to think that a price in Europe or Australia should be in anyway related to a price in the US long before it gets into the realm of 'price gouging'.  Look at car prices for an example, a car built in Germany (The GTI, they are all built at Wolfsburg) costs much more to buy in Germany than it does in the US.  Why?  It's not price gouging it market forces and government policies and a thousand other things.

You didn't just reference SimGolf, did you?

Man, where is gog when you need them to come through? That game was so cool when you spent the time to customize names and lines. I remember the first time I had an old version of my character show up on a new character's course. I knew because I saw a bunch of swearing. Sure enough, Busta Clubs was on the green again.

SimGolf was far more entertaining than it had any right to be, yes.

I had SimAnt as a kid which frankly was a pretty bizarre game.  I was a Mac user back then though and pretty much desperate to play any game.

SimAnt was pretty cool. It's SimEarth I reallly miss though. It was so neat crashing ice asteroids into Mars to terraform it.

Fuck, I loved SimGolf. Now I want to play it. THANKS GUYS

Isn't it what we're here for? :grin:

I might still have my copy of SimGolf somewhere...

I still have my disc, not sure if Win 7 would like it. If EA was serious about Origin, they'd take one ingredient from Steam (biannual sales with real discounts) and one from gog (making their back catalog available with modern OS compatiblity). Because I'd totally buy a digital version of SimGolf on Origin to de-disc it.

Such an act would be highly encouraging for me...there's a bunch of stuff on GOG I want, but can't get because they're based in Europe, and my bank apparently doesn't like me using my card on the internet to make foreign purchases.   :uhrr:

This. I would kill for a modern, 3D version of SimEarth. I was pretty disappointed when the space phase of Spore didn't live up to that.

So was everyone else, up to and including WW.

However, in this particular example we are talking about prices of virtual item, delivered over intratubes to different IPs. The concepts of "it's Europe" or "it's Australia" largely cease to apply, as evidenced by the fact the price you're charged can magically shrink or grow by 30% based simply on what proxy you choose to connect to the store, while your physical location (as well as the delivery point that's your computer and the credit card or whatever you use to finance the purchase) remain the same.

(the really amusing part is, apparently buying through Polish page of Origin results in paying equivalent of ~$40-50 for ME3 or the new SimCity, while the US customers are being asked $60 for the same editions? Despite Poland being part of EU and as such a subject of the same legal agreements and arrangements that supposedly drive the price up in the rest of Europe...)

It was a double reference: 1) SimGolf and 2) disc golf/frisbee golf (playing off the hippie vibe in the quoted post).

I bet I still have my SimGolf disks and I bet that my Jurassic computer will run it without any fucking about on my part.

It seems to run okay. I installed it the other day, but didn't get a chance to do much other than just that, install it. There are some command line hax to get it to run in 1920x1080, etc.

You're such a tease.

SimCity Glassbox engine demo via Machinima (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsSCkctKv5k&feature=player_embedded#!)

Sorry I didn't supply a link, it's pretty easy to find: http://www.widescreengaming.net/wiki/SimCity_4

That's not SimGolf.

Yeah, I think I got my wires crossed during the convo. Nothing to see here.

Dammit! Some day SimGolf will be back!

Hmm definitely quells some of my fear of them dumbing things down. Adding in resources certainly changes things, depending on how deep and integrated the system is.

I just wish they had a less retarded publisher. :oh_i_see:

Always on internet required for SimCity (Origin must always be on). (http://www.joystiq.com/2012/03/28/simcity-requires-internet-connection-to-play-will-be-sold-outsi/)

They say its because "The always-on connection becomes necessary with the game's emphasis on multiplayer and regional impact, and the use of a global economy that all players can influence."

Always on for SimCity?  :uhrr:

Yeah, about that whole "less retarded publisher" thing... :why_so_serious:

Why the hell do I need a global or regional economic aspect to my Sim City?  On the plus side, I wrote this off right away, so I can't really feign outrage, I just don't care.

I'm sure the addition of multiplayer will really be a great addition and in no way will kids grief by plopping down horrid little messes just to fuck with people.

An f13 map would be interesting for the two weeks anyone will care about this game.

The rationale sounds a lot like "We wish we were working at Zynga."

Is this still Origin only?

Looks that way, what with the "must be online on origin" deal.

So while I've basically discounted this game when it was announced, I'm still interested in seeing just how retarded they are with the DRM bullshit. I can only hope they'll pull a new AC2. :why_so_serious:

Article I just read said no as far as where you can buy it, no idea if you must have origin, most likely yes.

You can buy it outside of Origin but you must play it on Origin. Like Steamworks but with a shittier service.

So yeah, it's still Origin-only.

That wasn't for me.

That was to remind you all to STOP GIVING A FUCK.

Goddamn. When will the vast lot of you fuckers learn not to buy EA shit.

When they stop publishing games I like?  I can't say that I've had any issues with Origin.

The depressing part is this one may be quite good. sneak peek at rps (http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/03/28/first-look-simcity/) has it, apparently they're changing the entire simulation approach to be driven bottoms-up, from individual agents level.

I'm not sure I see the difference. The game was pretty much always guided by agents taking simulated car trips and making decisions, just at a fairly abstracted level since you need to model millions of them. Using some of them to drive graphic indicators or decorations is a logical progression (especially from people who own the SIMS franchise) as is trying to make it a social game. Though the more you focus on the minutia and graphics the more you risk losing the evolution of the city which was the point of sim-city.

But like Schild says it's EA and Origin so I don't really care.

It's like they think we never read the manual for this shit, or something.

Can't recall the last time I read manuals, bro.
Even Civ V is pick up and play.

SimCity | Disaster Trailer (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Ig6E2460V0&feature=youtu.be)

 :awesome_for_real:

There's a few other gameplay videos floating around that make me want this.

EA still makes games? I haven't seen any on Steam recently.   :oh_i_see:

Oh god. That's right. We will have to let EA touch our machines sacred places to play this. That's a bummer.

One of the gameplay videos I watched the other day mentioned that you no longer have to lay down water pipes, water automatically follows roads. That and the water table system seems pretty neat.

Yeah, it is Origin required and Always Online. 

Yeah, I do like how they're reducing micromanage-y shit like pipes and extraneous power lines, and instead giving us more interesting things like upgradeable power plants and multiple ways to address problems (e.g. sewage - treat or dump?).

In SC2K, I just laid down cross-street pipes to get water flowing; in SC4, I just made a grid of "watered area" whenever I expanded my city. It was fiddly and annoying; not exactly an interesting choice.

Arise!

So there's a closed beta going on this weekend and I've got a spare key if anyone wants it. Still installing my own version so no impressions yet, plus I'm not sure if there's an NDA. PM me if you're interested in the key.

Edit: Key is gone. Won't have time to play it until after work tonight; seems the NDA prevents us from posting pics or videos but not talking about it, so I'll be sure to post some impressions after I check it out.

More interested in impressions.  Game comes out in March so that's not too long to wait.

http://tweakers.net/video/7099/eerste-speelsessie-met-simcity.html

Video gameplay + Commentary. The commentary is in Dutch, but an English interview begins at 4:45.  The interviewer grills him pretty good.

When I used to get high I thought I could understand Dutch.

Reports are that the beta weekend was a washout.  Apparently having to login to a server just to play offline crushed the hamsters running the wheel.  Oh EA  :uhrr:

EA, ruining good games through DRM since 2008?

(http://i.imgur.com/l4o5nFH.png)
(http://i.imgur.com/TPKHcqz.png)
(http://i.imgur.com/4u2q56q.png)

You mentioned the P word. :oh_i_see:

Best Radicalthon Ever.

But is it fun?  :why_so_serious:

I got into the beta and managed to play two sessions over the weekend. It's okay. I enjoyed my two one-hour sessions.

However, between the one-hour time limit and the lockdown of anything beyond the very very very early game, it's hard to say whether it'll have any legs. It's basically a nice little boutique suburbia simulator. There's a bunch of frustrating interface stuff if you're OCD about minmaxing or beautifying your cities, and the always-online crap is ridiculous.

I've got it on preorder, but I grew up as a huge SC2000 fanatic, so don't take my recommendation without a lot of salt.

While the picture post is a bit ranty, banning the guy for it is excessive.  Continuing the lesson that you shouldn't buy EA games, ever.

I saw it as more of a 'helping a guy with his convictions' kind of thing, now he doesn't have to deal with evil drm. Because nobody gives a shit what you think. Buy it or don't; and save the panty-wringing for your little drm hate drum circle jerk.

I definitely see how "give people an option to play offline, or at the very least make sure your servers can actually handle the load, or you will get bad reviews and you will lose sales" is "panty-wringing" and a "little drm hate drum circle jerk".

 :oh_i_see:

What's the service being offered in their always online requirement? If there is no service or advantage to the consumer, it shouldn't exist, and EA should suffer the consequences of their poor decisions.

Well, it does supposedly have "multiplayer" and "passive interactions with other players", but I don't quite understand why the fuck I would want this as a minimum requirement in a simcity game, or why I should want to "passively interact with other players" in the first place.

Yea, you can have friends in your regions building other cities and there are elements of trading utilities and so forth, this is their "big thing" but it doesn't sound like something I want in a Sim City game.  I sort of like what I see in terms of aesthetic and so forth, but I'm going to pass on this one.  I can always reinstall Sim City 4 if I really get a hankering for Sim City and be perfectly happy with it.

That has some interesting possibilities, actually.   My city has extra sewer/ electric capacity, let me try and sell that at a price per citizen to another city online.   Real municipalities already do this, so why not virtual ones?

The problem being that real municipalities have to deal with real-world physical limitations, while random_internet_city can always just search for a guy with a lower rate.  They can ignore Florence_City who demands unincorporated_townie pay a premium.

Don't get me wrong, I have no problems seeing the possibilities in that particular feature, I just don't think it should be mandatory, and I don't see why they can't just let people play offline if they want to play offline.

He doesn't circle-jerk about evil DRM and how he won't play because of it. To the contrary, he says he doesn't mind it as long as they can actually keep their authentication servers up so he can play when he wants to play.

Which frankly isn't too much to ask for and the ban in response is far more of a "Fuck you" kind of thing.

Because game companies are convinced that they are losing billions per year to piracy. Don't ask me how they'll deal when people just stop buying their games altogether.  Probably convince themselves that somehow the dirty Pirates are to blame the same way the RIAA did. 

After the tutorial, I'd tried to do the 1 hour cities but kept disconnecting so I just gave up. Between the always-online crap and the stupid Sims voices I'll probably be giving this a pass at launch.

They have a bunch of features like the "global market" that you could lazily assert to require always-online connectivity. You can sell stuff to the world and buy stuff from the world; the latter seems somewhat important when bootstrapping a whole new region.

Of course, you could always just update the prices whenever the thing got online and not lock out people with bad internet connections or business travellers laid over in airport lounges that cost £4 per hour for shitty wifi, fuck YOU Heathrow.

In short, it's DRM with some strawberry lube slathered over it. The problem is that they're selling it as an Icepop and people are calling 'em on that.

Stealth Edit: I'm still buying the fucker, because I have a burning need to see my childhood ruined or something.

For me, the multiplayer connection stuff actually makes the title much more interesting. With prior Sim Cities I always just kind of staggered around directionless until I got bored and made Godzilla smash everything. Adding that other layer of interaction sounds more interesting to me.

EDIT: The idea that someone else might actually see what I make is a big part of that. Much like how Minecraft is about a thousand times better on a multiplayer server.

Why couldn't they have made the multiplayer stuff asynchronous? Similar to what they had going with Spore where your creations are put online, and the game brings in that stuff.

So you'd have your City shared with your friends.  Your 'exports' or what not now interface easily with your friends without having to always be online.

Is the online aspect integrated into the client or do you need to have the origin app running?

Nah, can't do that.  Spore ended up doing pretty poorly because pirates and pirates.  If the Online interaction was more heavy handed and intrusive, it would have been so much better because that's anti-pirate technology.  Electrolytes.  It's what plants need!

It's out! Hours long queues to build a city in a phone booth

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUl_Cj2_KWU

I find it quite funny that people are actually, unironically, still surprised by this. Some of the comments are "well great to see this video coming out a few minutes after I've bought the game" and "well, it'll pass, it won't last forever, it worked in the end with diablo".

Beaten spouse syndrome, anyone? :oh_i_see:

thanks for supporting the game guys, enjoy the day 1 server error 40. You make it all happen!
those who bought this, you brought this on yourselves.
i have no pity to give.

(https://dl.dropbox.com/u/829607/Bloodbowl/hmm.gif)

Given that EA for the last couple years has been blatantly putting games on the shelf that are nothing but a box with a mousetrap inside, a hole cut in it, and 'INSERT PENIS HERE ->' written beside the hole, people don't have any excuse for the result at this point.

EA is making shitty games with shitty DRM on their shitty Steam competitor and trying to con people into buying shitty RMT because 'the market demanded it'.  Stop buying EA games, idiots.

I wonder just how long it'll take for someone to make an "offline" version of the game.

Like Mass Effect 3, Dead Space 3, and a few other titles, I'd love to get this game.  But EA is just too much these days.  Such a shame :(

It somewhat amazes me the number of people who bought the game. SimCity online, brought to you by EA just screams 'FAIL' to me, as a massive SimCity fan. Gamers have no one to blame but themselves for the shitty products and services they receive, unfortunately.

Came to thread to find out whether or not to buy, question answered.  I haven't been keeping up and didn't even know you have to be online.  There are semi-useful reasons for blizzard pulling that with diablo and even then I wasn't happy about it.

I was pretty damn dubious about buying it just because they try to clip you for another twenty bucks to get graphics for different cities right from the start.  Plus I don't like running origin.

Man I would love an up to date city sim though.

Probably a lot of Sims crossover.  Those people are just sick.

Even beyond the obvious "lolqueues" problem, there's a lot about this new SimCity that just really turns me off.

There's a lot of relatively pointless simulation going on, like every single individual citizen in your city having their own daily schedule, where they leave their home, drive (or take public transportation) to work, go in to work, leave for lunch, go back, then head back home. The only practical application of this is letting you click on an individual person or vehicle and watch through a zoomed-in chase cam as it goes about its day. It's a nice novelty, but novelties wear thin, and the "daily schedule" thing can actually have some gameplay consequences.

Crime is actually reduced or stopped by a physical police presence; police cruisers leave the precinct, drive around on patrol, stop crime where they see it, and change their routine to respond to calls. That's all well and good, but when the game's AI routines fuck up, as they're known to do? You'll have a conga line of police cruisers driving in circles around a few blocks, following each other and not doing any crime preventing. As a result, crime in the rest of your city skyrockets. Plop down a new power plant or sewage treatment facility? Enjoy not having any power and those backed up sewer pipes until people get hired for the place (hiring seems to be done only after the building is built, and not during construction like nearly every real-life business does) and finally move in to start working.

You can apparently exhaust the actual city building portion after a couple of hours, and management becomes largely a non-issue not long after, if you've got even half-decent planning skills. So what do you do after?

The only other real thing is to go and try to build a Great Work. To do that, however, you need a lot of actual raw materials. Metals, consumer goods, things like that. So how do you get them? Well, you can buy them straight from manufacturers like real businesses do... but the real answer is "gather them yourself." But Great Works require so many materials that multiple cities in a region need to work together to get the stuff done.

That's cool and all, but there's a problem: Due to the level of simulation that each individual city is running, if you switch to working on another city in the region? Every other city not being actively controlled by another human player stops. Completely. No money is generated, no citizens come into your city for work, pollution they generate stops. If you're working with a few other people to build something, and one person stops and never returns? Sucks to be you, that city's locked out for good.

On top of that, due to the extremely tiny and confined nature of each city (all perfectly square, all no more than 4km²), each city in a region must specialize into something. One city mines ore and smelts it into metal, shipping it to another city with enough storage to hold it all for the Great Work. Another city drills for oil, or operates consumer electronics plants, etc.

The game turns from a goofy city planning, development, and management sim into a combat-less Anno Lite, where you're managing fucking trade deals and constructing supply chains.

The worst part is, there's some stuff the game does that I actually really like! The ability to upgrade individual buildings to increase their effectiveness or give new things they can do (like expanding a police precinct's patrol car fleet or building on an expanded jail) is pretty great and helps reduce the somewhat ridiculous amount of redundant buildings you had to build in older games. The way power, water, and sewage flows is really cool and natural, and power outages affect the places they should affect.

But ugh, it's all just such a big mess.

In other words, it's more or less making exactly the same mistakes as CitiesXL, except I think CitiesXL didn't stop simulation entirely.

Oh well.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidthier/2013/03/05/simcity-launch-marred-by-server-problems/

Forbes weighs in. They are my source for gaming stuff now outside of here.

Actually, I love the idea of a SimCity built entirely on autonomous agents--that's an approach a lot of "artificial society" simulation research has been turning to and it is both interesting and fun. But the EA DRM/always-online junk is a huge barrier to this thing not sucking.

I'm sure glad that I didn't get sucked into pre-ordering. I learn, ever so slowly but it happens eventually.

The geek in me loves this idea.  The cynical gamer in me hates the idea of babysitting dumb AI.

I hope some game design expert comes in now and tells us how we don't need better AI. Because fuck you.

I could pick lint off Iolo's sweater but he'd still be walking into a corner and spinning in circles.

AI is hard to code. Cash shops and DRM are easy.

AI is hard, let's go shopping. Tee hee.

I'll put down pretend money that the tracking of every single citizen's whole routine means they never, ever get larger city sizes to run acceptably.

A lot of problems that are chalked up to stupid AI can be solved other ways, but if one of the big selling points of your game is that everything is dependent on your AIs doing their jobs efficiently, you better make them not stupid.   :awesome_for_real:

The autonomous AI is a selling point to me. Seriously. My inner geek goes "Fuck yeah!" and my inner spreadsheet geek drools over the data I can use.

OTOH, always online and, well....I'll wait a few months, get it on sale once they've patched some of the stupid out.

thread title change please.
EA rapes another corpse.

There you go.

 :Love_Letters:

Also copied from another forum

He left off the shit storm related to all the fucking IAP* requirements in Real Racing 3.

IAP = In-app Purchase, Apple's term for microtrans (which aren't micro anymore)

Been reading about all the problems with the launch of this.  Servers crashing, origin problems, roll backs of entire cities, cities just disappearing along with a host of other bugs and problems.  Seems to only take a couple hours to finish a city too, since they are so small.

I call it Global Warming - a feature.  :grin:

The last Command and Conqeur game didn't work on release day either because the servers were overwhelmed.

Ah well, Sim City 4 is a pretty decent game...

Waiting for the Steam release!

this is what paradox shd be too.
online only - crusader kings online would've been the best shit ever.
with micro trans to claim de jure counties and shit.
Max Demense capped at 1 till u buy the package...
cause that's how the old empire works: whoever has the most wealth has power.

(http://i.imgur.com/Jmee1fw.gif)

(http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ZawyhCAkCbM/UFjfbeqaL_I/AAAAAAAADD4/VV4QaEYK0H8/s1600/cristiano-ronaldo-jews.gif)

"When you are sixty hours into playing Crusader Kings and your best heir has an assassin breathing down his neck, and we ask you for a dollar to encourage that assassin to slip on a banana peel instead, you're really not very price sensitive at that point in time. We're not gouging, but we're charging."

Considering the competitive nature of Crusader Kings Online, it is no surprise that the more people pay the Assassins (Hashasshin Pack 1 Week Pack @ $4.99 introduced in the Feb 2013 patch update) to slay you, the more likely their plot will succeed.

But we will never make it a one-sided advantage, you too, can hire additional help in form of the Royal Guards Pack ($4.99) to protect your liege better. If you are unable to afford this, you may attempt to request aid from your allies over Facebook, Twitter and other social media. Bring in 2-3 friends and receive a free temporary Intrigue bonus for a day!

See you in Jerusalem!

(http://i156.photobucket.com/albums/t17/jeremyqueen/Frame-AAAAAAA.jpg)

God damn I'm depressed now.  I'll go find a bridge.

If the dumb AI was dumb in ways that resembled actual dumb human agents it would make for an interesting simulation, and maybe in some ways a fun one too. Some of my favorite moments in some games are when certain kinds of emergent effects or glitches make AIs do something that is dumb in a life-like or unpredictable way--say, in a strat game when the AI does something you've never seen before just because there's a weird terrain layout or an unusual confluence of events, etc. Some of my colleagues do work with neural-net programming and robot mobility and they've occasionally come across really cool emergent behaviors that are initially a total surprise and in some ways kind of entertaingly stupid--I could see building a game AI that's trying to create circumstances that produce similar outcomes.

(http://imgur.com/Zx3Se78.png)

The possibilities of emergent behavior was why I really wanted the game. (The possibility of a neighboring city quitting the game and leaving me fucked up the ass made me NOT want to buy the game. WTF, no offline only mode?)

Intellectually, individual Sim AI (which doesn't need to be much more than a pair of sliders --- coupled with a routing algorithm for when they want to eat or go to work) is a big step forward. In game terms, it seems to really limit their city size (which isn't bad per se, but it's obnoxious to people used to cities of 20 million. They might have been better off simulating larger groupings or had each 'sim' represent 10 or a 100 people) and there seems to be a real lag between changes and adjusting the individual Sims.

I understand making the sliders 'sticky' (real people have lag time) but some stuff? Like bitching about crime rates when the rate is zero?

Also, with emergent behavior -- some behaviors are DUMB and have to be weeded out. Like the reports of police patrols that are 40 cars following the same path, etc.

I just wish they'd, I dunno, make a GUI for Dwarf Fortress. :) Their GUI's tend to be allright. :)

*Imagines open-source Simcity clone where you and your friends can cluster your computers to create as large and as detailed city as you have resources for*

Query: Has anyone here actually picked this up and played it?  Thoughts?

Sounds like even if you had picked it up, you can't be playing it.

I bought it, played it for an hour or so the night of launch. Didn't have any server problems, lag, queues, etc. but didn't like it very much either. I'm not sure if you can make private regions, but I don't really like gaming with internet strangers so that was a big turn off. I ended up having to mute the sound effects because I can't stand that stupid Sims speak and you can't disable it individually. Honestly haven't played it long enough to give a fair review because I bought two other games at the same time and have been busy with other things.

You can make private regions.  So you can play them all yourself, or just invite friends to join.

Shhh...don't muddle the meme with actual facts.

(http://i.imgur.com/QOzldBt.jpg)

https://twitter.com/GOGcom/status/309328842345050112


 :why_so_serious:

So, apparently not only does it *only* save your games online, save games are specific to the server you played on... so if your server is busy or offline or whatever when you next want to play... even if another server is available, oh too bad, can't load your game.   Wow.

Thank you for the public service announcement Quinton, now get back in the queue, you're scaring the sheep.

How is it possible that games in 2013 suck more than 10 or 20 years ago?

(https://dl.dropbox.com/u/85916/face.png)

So...I can't see your privates?   :grin:

The industry's a shithold and lots of devs hate their audience.

There's a crash a-comin' and it's going to be epic.

Ah well, there's another franchise that's dead to me.

Publicly traded companies.  Having to answer to shareholders fucks any enterprise up.

Actually I think the issue is gaming companies are trying to tap the aging market that has more disposable income than ever, and their kids. They expanded beyond belief when riding the high side the wave, and are now mired in their corporate behemoths, just as the economy went into the shitter and financing for new projects dried up. That started the cycle of cost-cutting which many of them targeted at the development level instead of the overhead level. Also, they tried to put DRM moats around their IPs to make up for what they perceived to be lost revenues so they could make up some of the difference.

In a down economy nobody was/is willing to take any chances, so they just kept trying to copy the same shit. In between recovery from the .com bubble bursting and the 2008 downturn, we actually got to see some decent games. We also had some pretty good games before the tech bubble went boom.

Great games are still being made, they just aren't YOUR games. Simcity? Seriously? Any franchise that old is either dead or bought up by some faceless corporation. Just face facts, we're all old and we used to be into 'it' but now 'it' is something new and strange and we don't know what 'it' even is any more.

Go sit in on a class at your local community college and you'll have your answer as to why games suck these days.

Ahh yes, the everyone is dumber argument.  :awesome_for_real:

But of course, we're wrong again..

(http://i.imgur.com/K4TOuML.jpg)

BUT THERE'S STILL HOPE!

(http://i.imgur.com/rUvSn7L.jpg)

I'd have accepted the shitty DRM if city sizes were reasonable.  But those tiny cities and everything else is just too much compromise.  Good news is Cities in Motion 2 is out soonish and SimCity4 still exists.  I have no doubt SimCity will be unplayable 10 years hence as the servers will be long shuttered.

Problem here is that last I checked, both Tropicos required a kalypso account to start up, CitiesXL and City Life 2008 were terribad, and I haven't played either cities in motion or towns, so I've no real idea of their suck-factor.

Cities in Motion basically plays itself. The game goes like this:
* Start
* Take out bonds
* Make two metro stations
* Ignore water taxis, buses, trams and everything else because they're awful.
* Quit and play a decent game

Cities in Motion 2, hopefully, will solve this.

Edit: I also bought the new SimCity. Installed it last night, logged on to Euro West 1 and then instantly quit because it was bedtime.

Combined with the churn in the industry as dudes with actual degrees (I'm in a community college now. My work's hard. It's not four year compsci hard.) burn themselves out? Yeah. Those CC and Full Sail kids aren't coming up in a vacuum. Dudes I know with nine, ten years of experience in the industry hit a wall and just burn out. They want to see their kids and spouses. If they have to crunch, they don't want to get paid 10k less a year than they would in a grown up field. There's zero pressure on anyone to pay for the best because the suits know there's an army of Hollywood waiters from degree mills waiting for their big break in Austin, SV, and RTP; they'll pay a third less to cut costs and not be burned because they know that everyone will snap up whatever horseshit gets churned out.

Which doesn't mean good games aren't being made. Of course they are. It'd be retarded to say otherwise. But they sure are a lot less thick on the ground, the barrier to entry to get in is a lot higher, and everything is monetized to hell and back.

There are a lot more SimCity and D3 situations out there than... I dunno, whatever the hell people think is awesome these days. Path of Exile or something.

Which parts of sim city and D3's problems is/were due to "dumb developers"?

Is this a trick question?

Choosing to simulate every asshole in your city then presumably finding out half way through development that whoops this scales like shit so we better make tiny neighborhood sized cities was, imo, at least getting priorities mixed up.  The simulation should service big expansive cities, you shouldn't compromise the whole point of a city builder for some cool little feature like following individual sims as they go about their very similar lives.  

Unless they're simply holding back big cities for DLC then it's just EA.

To boot, I don't know that you can separate out the evil, scary suits from the benign, put-upon devs when it comes to these monetization schemes and the way the DRM works anymore. It doesn't work that way.

The whole thing seems very much like the Simsville game they were developing back in 1999-2001, which got canned along with SimMars when The Sims made them giant moneyhats. Reviving that might have been a better move in terms of market expectations than this debacle.

Still looking forward to playing John D. Rockefeller tonight.

I'll give the simulation of everything as a design choice which might not scale as well as we might desire it to do, but the way the always on drm has been put in there isn't due to some "dumb developer" or due to some "lack of intelligence" on the part of the techies, it's down to the suits' greed, pure and simple.

Do you think that the particular way it was implemented, with the full experience only gotten through connection to others, was down to the suits writing up the design docs and putting in the code? With D3, do you think the particular way in which the RMAH was implemented was all suits or all devs? Or do you think it was a little bit of both? When the head of Gearbox lied about a PC-only UI for Borderlands 1, was that the suits pushing him to do it? Was Mark Jacobs lying or just kidding about WAR? To himself or to you? Was he a suit or a dev?

Let me tell you a story. I've worked at a AAA company and had a dev (lead dev) and a suit (lead PR) stream a live interview on Gamespot which saw them lie, baldfaced, to their customers prior to release. Not stretch the truth. Not fibs. Lie. About what was in the game and about how much it had been tested, content which the internal folks hadn't even seen yet. One major dev. One major suit. Working in tandem. And it happens everywhere.

This notion that if the suits would go away then it would be a wonderful industry with smart devs leading us back to the promised land is a fiction. What each side does is intertwined the other and you can't untangle it anymore. Outside of the small development end and a few large companies (eg Valve) the distinctions aren't what you think they are. Things are fucked, dude.

So let's distill it down to greed, not lack of intelligence, and leave the "suits" definition out of it. Works either way.

I'm mostly okay with doing that, but the crux of what I was saying was that stupidity does play a role in it. When you burn out industry vets by the time they're 30, you don't replace experience with experience. You replace him with someone lower on the totem pole, on down, and the guy who will replace THAT guy in ten years isn't a four comp-sci dude from the prestigious tech university anymore but some schlub from Full Sail or an EBGames manager who just, like, wants to make games, man. That's been going on for a good five or six (at least) years now.

In other words, ineptitude and inexperience, not greed or outright malice.  The usual industry MO of over-promise of what you're able to deliver and apologize/ patch for it later.

The new devs all come from the Peter Molyneux Institute of Game Design and Marketing.

It's the EU launch day.

EA promised the game's problems would be resolved by then.

The SO bought me Simcity as a surprise gift.

The EU servers are down.

edit: Got in! Awesome, I knew complaining on f13 would help!

What's kind of funny is that I know numerous people (at least 5) who went to Full Sail...none of them work on games, though at least some of them work in other programming fields.

School always seemed like a massively-overpriced mill school to me, like a glorified ITT Tech or something.

This thread is the best advertisement for Sim City 4 it ever had. :D

Yep, but that would still put money in ea's pocket.

So now the word is that EA is turning off stuff, like achievements, leaderboards, and such to improve server performance.  We have now gone beyond Error 34; we're in the uncharted territories now.   :uhrr:

Even Microsoft is getting away from their own DRM shit.

Age of Empires 2 is getting an HD re-release on Steam, complete with workshop support.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_MEFt7KrxQ

Really? What great games being made started a new franchise before the end of 2008?

Most of gaming between then and now has been just sequels and redos.

EDIT: 2 jumped immediately to mind, Dragon Age and Demon's Souls. But that's pretty much it for 2009.

Wat? Are you trying to say there's been no original, great games in the last 5 years?

I can't really think of any besides Minecraft and Portal.

I'm saying that if you actually dig into releases of each year, you'll see exactly how rare a new idea or series actually was.

Remember when I told you I got in? Well, I was afk for a while and now I can't even load the executable because the launcher fails to authenticate.

edit: looks like their hotfix fucked up everything.

edit: I can now log in and start the game, but the actual game servers are down too so no playing.

This is the best launch.

I'm making a note here.

HUGE SUCCESS FAIL!

tl;dr: EA press release says "If you really feel that you've been let down, please request a reund from us." Guy attempts to do so, gets told "No refunds. If you contest this, we'll ban you from Origin."

 :oh_i_see:

Oh no, Br'er Fox, pleeeeease don't throw me in that briar patch!

Oh, and by the way, if you perform a chargeback on Origin because they wouldn't refund you? They'll ban you anyway.

This thread is fantastic.
(https://dl.dropbox.com/u/85916/mj_popcorn.gif)
(https://dl.dropbox.com/u/85916/enjoying_popcorn.gif)
(https://dl.dropbox.com/u/85916/popcorn.jpg)

If you look exclusively at AAA titles, maybe, but there's still tons of small studio or indie releases with new franchises.  It's just big money that's hesitant to roll the dice with an untested IP.

I have graduated to a 20 minute queue. 12 minutes left. Any bets?

I bet you could spend your time more wisely.

Network error.  :heartbreak:

fake edit: I'm actually watching Giant Bomb videos and sipping on coffee, not expecting Sim City to work for at least a week.

It absolutely is, although they let you play with some neat toys while you're there.

Psychonaughts sprang immediately to mind. But that was in 2005 and no-one bought it because it was original and new. PS I hate gamers.

Arkham Asylum I suppose counts as somewhat original.

Amazon pulled  the digital version of SimCity from their store:

http://www.amazon.com/Electronic-Arts-41018ted-Edition2-SimCity/dp/B007VTVRFA

On the Amazon detail page:


That's almost a PSA warning  :grin:

 :rofl:


Yessss...let the retailers start swinging the axe, and that miracle patch will get here slightly quicker  :why_so_serious:

That literally just happened.  

And that wasn't done lightly.

Edit: clarification, the Buy Box is still up for the physical version.  So not totally pulled.

You're here because the FB group reminded you this site existed, yeah?

I didn't jump into D3 at launch, is this worse? Worst launch of all time?

I'd have to give that title to BRINK.  I guess Diablo 3 wasn't a great launch, but I played most of release day with only a few problems.

I dunno, Anarchy Online is still king of the mountain in my book.  But then FunCom didn't have an army of stockholders ready to start spilling blood either  :why_so_serious:

I wonder what the "26 Gaming Awards" it apparently won were.

They took a e-mail survey in the marketing division, each positive reply counted as an award.

Nah, I just haven't felt like posting in a while.  I mean, I found out about the FB group from here in the first place.

That's not actually a queue by the way, it has no intelligent queue system where the first person in is the first person to get a spot.  That just means it will try to connect again in twenty minutes.  You may as well restart the client over and over until you get in (if the servers are up), (if your city hasn't been deleted) (etc.).

I think that's what he was actually trying to say in the conversational flow. No Refunds, and if you tell your bank to refund it anyways we'll ban you. I believe steam has the same policy towards using chargebacks against them.

That tech support dude missed a memo or the EA dude did, because it's pants on head to say "yeah, ask for refunds" followed by "we said you can ask, we didn't say you'd fucking get one. Piss off!"

I'm gonna take this thread back to '00s!

(http://cdn.memegenerator.net/instances/400x/35833838.jpg)

 :why_so_serious:

So EA has removed the fastest game speed, because apparently they log everything and if people play too fast their servers can't keep up.

No, really.

edit: source http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9341807.page?ClickID=dnh0byt0s0xkko0sxz2xhsnynxxmhocokyxk

Good god, just Madagascar (http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/shut-down-everything) this shit already.  Or start the Fire Sale.

SimTrainWreck is kind of fun to watch.

Even by the standards of bad releases this is turning into something singular.

EA: The Best Ineptitude Money Can Buy.

Kinda sad, some friends were thinking of getting this and making a region together, but this is all sorts of silly.

IGN's "liveblog review (http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/03/04/simcity-review-in-progress)" of the game is starting to shame the game:


Emphasis mine.

And spectacular!  :why_so_serious:

I hope every executive in the world sees this and takes a big dump in their pants every time someone says 'the cloud'.

If only there had been some way for your friends to make their own server.

Please, that's not how executives work. They see this and think "cloud could have fixed that."

Everquest 2 had a pretty spectacular failure upon launch - practically everyone I know jumped ship to WoW when EQ2 died for a week or whatever.

So far this week, I thought that me buying Legend of Grimrock was the best thing that was going to happen. Then I read this thread.

IGN Sim City Review:

Good:

• Loading screen is pretty cool
• Also the music is pretty relaxing
• EA paid us a shitload of money

Bad:

• We can't actually play the game
• Game randomly deletes files from hard drive, sends inappropriate messages to relatives over facebook

IGN Score: 8.4 - GOTY

Non-MMO launch. I should have qualified but didn't feel it was necessary. Of COURSE MMO launches are comparable.

Although I'm trying to come up with another title this revered with this many copies out the door and I'm drawing a blank. Anyone?

Everquest 2 came out before WoW.


Diablo 3.

Oh, it feels like we're way, way past the D3 level when the largest online retailer in the world is stopping sales of your product.

Starcraft 2?

That didn't seem like it was your question. I thought you were just asking for examples of cluster-fuck releases of major titles.

I honestly do not remember that many issues with SC2 on release, but then Diablo 3 was a lot more of a "MUST PLAY NOW" kinda thing to me.

Please tell me the screen shot on the prior page is someone's facebook avatar in game and EA didn't REALLY steal the artwork of Milkman Dan from Red Meat.  (http://www.redmeat.com/redmeat/2013-01-22/index.html)

I haven't bought the game yet, but I'm contemplating asking for a refund anyway, in the hopes that they'll permanently ban my (unused) Origin account.

The most insane thing about all of this is that it's looking more and more like much of the simulation that people thought  was handled by the server is actually client-side. The simulation of the city you're currently actively tinkering with is wholly client-side, while the server itself only handles the regional city-to-city interactions, which explains why there are so many instances of stuff working completely fine in your city, but when you choose to send something like a payment to another city in the region, you lose the money properly, but the other city never receives it. It's even being speculated that the regional stuff could even have been done client-side with only a slight increase in system requirements.

So regional stuff and cloud saves, the only shit EA handles on their end, and the things that keep breaking everything, are pretty much there solely as anti-piracy measures.

I'm thinking there's been an increasing progression in fuckups from Spore, to AC2, to SC2, to D3 and now, Sim City. It's almost as if they're trying to one-up eachother's fuckups.

Or, it could just be that the public is getting more and more fed up with the DRM fuckups as time goes on (and yet they don't seem to do due diligence and check which DRM system the publisher has decided upon this time, to make the experience as shit as possible for legal users, while probably not even inconveniencing pirates one whit).

Considering the fact he's called "Dantooine", and that his two cities are Dan Francisco and Dan Jose ... I think that's just a client-chosen avatar.

That's because I conveniently left part out! It should've read a series so revered and that pushed this many copies out the door falling down this hard.

Was SC2 bad on launch? I don't remember anything particularly dreadful.

Granted that I never really got into the 'playing with others' part of SC2, but I got it on launch and had no issues with it that I can recall. Not that it mattered as there was an offline mode for SC2.

Uh, so... Yeah, Diablo 3, then.

That would have been cool. The multiplayer part of this did internist me, a cool feature for the series. The small sized areas were somewhat of a put off and, well all this shenanigans.

Yes, it would've, and 5+ years ago it would've been made in this fashion. And 5+ years ago I would be completely and utterly *lost* in this game, because it wouldn't be literally sucking every dick on the way to the parking lot.

still (http://www.jonathancresswell.co.uk/2013/03/review-simcity/) the best review of sim city

I see what he did there :awesome_for_real:

EQ 2 came out on 4 Nov 2004 according to Wikipedia. WoW came out on 23 Nov 2004. So, while technically correct, that it did come out first, his point still stands that everyone jumped ship and went to WoW essentially 3 weeks after EQ 2 came out.

SC2 launch was really good actually. Very few issues, latency, and some (iirc) was fixed somewhat quickly.

Best poll on EA's sites (http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9343259.page), only surprise is it was not done as a serious poll by an EA employee

Polygon lowered their score from 9.5, to 8, and now 4. lol.

I'm not linking to it because Polygon fucking sucks, but still.

That polygon link has something kind of interesting [emphasis mine]:


So if a user's computer does not meet the requirements, a refund is okay. If EA's servers do not meet the requirements, refunds are not ok... :facepalm: :uhrr: :why_so_serious:

This whole thing fills my heart with much joy.

Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight was the first game to have this bullshit Always online DRM and it had EXACTLY the same issues on launch day. I know, I was one of the suckers that bought it and I couldn't play it for a week. And when I did my lousy internet dropped in the middle of a mission, so it didn't save my progress :D

Pity the game was pretty... uh... yeah. Oddly I never finished it.  :oh_i_see:

But that does allow me to sit back and laugh at all the clowns that were still caught by this despite that foreshadowing. SUCKERS!!  :grin:

MN Vikings Punter goes on Twitter tirade RE:SimFail

http://kotaku.com/5989350/nfl-punter-kicks-the-crap-out-of-ea-and-simcity

 :why_so_serious:

Normally i would be upset at someone not only linking to Twitter, but to Kotaku - especially in the same damn post - but Kluwe is awesome and his tweet is even better



Also -



Mother fucker, Kluwe is going to be the reason why I finally actually give a shit about twitter. Wtf, divisional rival and all...damn him.

What do you expect from a school that got it's start bilking people with dreams of getting into the music business. The music business is even worse than game programming in terms of people who are willing to work for free doing your job for your boss.

there's also this tweet, by a Maxis public face

(http://i.imgur.com/R3j6XBQ.jpg)

As a Bears fan, I feel your pain.  But I love the dude.

Hah, ask me which program I went through!  I could do a whole thread on that place.

So I'm at a friend's place and we've both been trying to log in.  I got to play about five minutes before I got kicked.  I tried to log in after about four hours later and got greeted with this:

(http://i.imgur.com/HcXU9Id.png)

Your city transcended into the ethereal, excellent, you should be on top of the leader boards.  If they were working.

Is this a SimCity or an EA business model simulator?



:internet hi five.jpg:
Yeah, he's one of those divisional rivals which is tough to hate, good thing he's only a punter!

Ya we talked about that one day in Eve.

(https://dl.dropbox.com/u/829607/Bloodbowl/KoK/MD03/mm.png)


Will this rescue EA from bad PR?  (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=_RgEA07lAZI)

Whose EA executive cock is he sucking?

GameSpot review: 5.0 (Mediocre) (http://www.gamespot.com/simcity/reviews/simcity-review-6405012/?tag=Topslot%3BSimcityReview%3BSimcityReview%3BFullReview)

 :ye_gods:  What, did CBS not get any EA cash drops?

Apologies if this is somewhere else in the thread, I can't find it:

What is this game actually using the internet connection for? As far as I can tell it isn't using the servers for actually running the sim, or is it?

Presumably just passing money/resources between cities, apparently the actual simulation etc is clientside.

I mentioned it a page or two ago. If peoples' observations are correct, EA's servers are used for two things (three, if you count login services): cloud storage of saves and the handling of city-to-city interactions within a region.

Anything that is happening within your city - the individual Sims' routines, the power grid, the water and sewer lines, all that - is 100% being handled by your client on your PC. However, anything you do that affects another city - sending money, having citizens commute to a job, or even pollution spillover - is done on the server end. This is why shipments of resources, or money transfers, or commuting citizens will leave your city and properly deduct the correct amount from your stockpiles, but then the other city will never see the stuff, everything vanishing at the border.

For "single-player" there's no real good reason why your PC can't handle the inter-region stuff since you can only ever have one city active at any time, and for the actual multiplayer the load could probably have been split among the active players, like people seeding a torrent to each other.

It's all ham-fisted anti-piracy.

I like the peacefulness and symmetry you got going there. Nice.

EA bribing review sites to hype up the latest release in an ongoing, once-beloved, series which is actually terrible and franchise-destroying?
But that never happens.

All we need now is for the usual suspects to start claiming that the players don't appreciate the art involved and should shut up and appreciate being shat upon. Well, the usual suspect that haven't been fired yet and their sites folded.

That 91 Metacritic score now stands at 79.  Depending on IGN and some of the other 'actual' reviewers, that may go down further.

Let's hope Maxis didn't sign an agreement with payouts being dependent on metacritic scores of >90% :why_so_serious:

Metacritic is still also using Polygon's original 95 score.  So, yeah, numbers are fun.

Stolen from SA; someone confirm:


Because ahahahahah

Also

(http://i.imgur.com/kowPyO9.gif)

If that gets confirmed, then this has just entered an immortal rank of fuck-ups going way beyond the always-online DRM shit.

You know, at this point I'm actively hoping that is the case.

So far, this is the Game Industry Event of 2013.

Found a good review...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FsrzqJNQF8

Quick, someone make a SimCity version of this: (http://i.imgur.com/SLQJc.gif)

What's wrong IGN? Surely your fawning review has already been written...

I find it funny that they've waited until NOW to worry about looking like cocksucking devwhores.

It's not like IGN is some bastion of credibility. Do you think that over there they still see themselves as journalists? I'd like to think they do, and that glowing review is sitting on an idealist editor's desk. And he's staring at it as his self-constructed contrived world of objective reporting falls around his ears.

Did they ever see themselves as journalists?

So my buddy got some play time in last night, presumably after most everyone else had given up.  All progress (about 3-4 hours' worth) lost upon reload.

OMG, I just got to play for an hour or so. Almost filled the map already.

Did e'er a poet pose
In so brief a tyme
Such comedy in his prose
Yet tragedy in his rhyme

Not really sure what the hate on Polygon is about. I kind of feel the same about IGN, but I don't visit that site for non-review issues. From what I've seen/heard from a lot of the staffs, they're solid.

Their SimCity review was a PR puff piece that contained no useful criticism.  I understand someone might play a game and love it unconditionally but if you're writing what purports to be buying guide for your readers you owe it to them to cover well worn issues and point out stuff other people might have a big problem with.  Then once they'd done their bit selling the game they backpedal in the face of interwebs fury for more page views or maybe critics remorse.

They might be wonderful people and perhaps most of their content is great but they certainly didn't cover themselves in glory with this instance.  But we're talking about the site so I guess they win anyway argh.

So, two questions, because I'm honestly curious. So, let's try to have this conversation without devolving into "BECAUSE 10" or "LAWL DEVWHORE".

What did they not put in the review initially that we wish they did? The server issues? -- Keep in mind, when they reviewed it, they HAD a stable server to play on before launch. They do mention the Always On stuff and what it means, if that's also an issue.

Secondly, would you not want them to revise their review as a warning to consumers?

From everything I've seen/heard (listening to a fair amount of podcasts) from these reviewers, I would never assume that they are DevWhores, especially sites like Polygon. The editors have been plenty critical in light of this situation and others. That's why I ask. The game seems plenty liked apart from the server issues, which ARE important and the sites I've seen have been covering it critically.

I don't plan to play this game and I certainly don't want to defend EA, but launch server issues are practically always ironed out within a few weeks -- should they really be a major component of a review score for a game that people are going to be playing for a long time?  The likely closing of the servers within ten years seems like a much bigger deal.

Games have always been hammered for buggy release states.  This is even worse, because usually those bugs didn't make the game totally unplayable.  Bugs were usually ironed out by patches after release as well, but that didn't save such awesome games as say Vampire: Bloodlines from being shit on by reviewers.  It's true that most of the connectivity problems will be fixed, but reviewers can't lie about their experience:  If the game doesn't work in the window of time the game is supposed to be review in, it doesn't work and doesn't deserve a passing grade.

Also consider that the problem here is worse than say, Diablo 3's error 37, because it actually effects gameplay and saves once you are in the game as well.  It's not simply a matter of 'can't connect to server', it's also that when you connect to the server the game isn't functional, your save is likely to get lost, and your city is liable to griefed by others abusing bugs.  Combining this with the fact that Sim City's raison d'etre doesn't depend on online play whatsoever makes the issues even more criticizable.

Online DRM has been a fact of gaming for 5 years now, you would've thought some of the bigger review sites would oh I dunno catch on to this and oh I dunno preemptively warn people that this might very well be an issue.

Oh wait, that would imply not getting a preview copy and/or bribe money. :oh_i_see:

Polygon calls that out specifically, though.

The DRM offers no service, therefore it has no reason to exist. If you want to require online activities, they must work, be non-intrusive to the customer, and provide some sort of benefit for participation.

I thought the IGN review was ok. They made it clear it was a review copy and stuff, and aside from gushing over the "OMG I CAN FOLLOW A SIM AROUND ALL DAY" I thought it was a fairly reasonable peace.

Just as a point of clarification, I'm not arguing for or against DRM.

I think the server issues can't be separated from the gameplay issues honestly.  

The gameplay issues people have (small cities, over-dependence on other cities in your region, particularly if you aren't making a private region, simplification of things like utilities) are all a result of the always online part.  I do not think for one second that someone was sitting around and though "This is the best way to do a Sim City game."  I think that always online DRM was stipulated as necessary, and the rest was shoe horned into to try and justify it.  

That's exactly the egregious point. They've shoehorned in DRM, it's caused a shitastic launch, and they are now fighting both refunds and even more brand damage. And for what? Piracy protection? YOU HAD THEIR MONEY ALREADY.

Tiny cities surrounded by vast acres of nothingness both looks crap and limits creativity, wonky traffic/agent AI that looks particularly silly with convoys of buses or emergency vehicles, stuff fans of the series will miss like farms(would've been perfect for filling that nothingness) & many mass transit options.  Things people have been bitching about for ages.
No problem in principle, I acknowledged it could be second thoughts.

I've seen other reviews mention the city size, but mostly it seems to come down to it being a weird image to see the large nothingness, but in the context of simulating the city itself, neither of those things truly affected their experience.

A lot of that is goign to be the long term aspect of the game. It's something that has come up before with MMOs like WoW. A lot of reviewers have talked about a "Revisiting the game" kind of thing where they may re-review the game based on age.

The other stuff, sure, would be nice to know, but none of those scream "devwhore" at all to me... just perhaps not the greatest review.

Since most of the game processing is done clientside, it is theoretically possible that there will be a pirate server set up that allows play before the EA system is wrinkle-free.  Which would make me grin.

While Polygon does have a blurb about it, it still kind of glosses over it and clearly hasn't taken the lessons learned over the increasingly escalating "war" of suck between publishers and gamers (like what happened with AC2 and Diablo 3 etc) to heart. I mean, they gave it a 9.5, even though there were a fucktonne of warning signs that it would be bad.

I can understand being surprised at how bad, because even I'm surprised at just how much they've fucked this launch up, but it was blindingly obvious to me the instant they mentioned that the game would be a "singleplayer online hybrid" that it would suck dicks during launch week.

Seriously. Nine point five!

I don't know where the IGN hate is coming from on this.  They have YET to publish a final review/score.  When they do, and if it is some frivolous 9.0+ Editor's Choice thing, then hate on.  But their live blog review isn't painting that pretty of a picture so far.

A lot of people don't like Polygon for a variety of reasons.

The first impression they ever gave was an incredibly shitty one. The Polygon website initially existed for months as a blank page of almost nothing except a pretentious-as-fuck masturbatory "documentary" about their development and launch of the site. They were rendered a laughing stock for months, but of course, that's long forgotten now. Oh, and despite all their crowing about integrity and being free from influence, they received a hefty sum of money from Microsoft in order to even launch the site, staining their rep from the word "go".

Their founders and senior staff are like a "who's who" of suck, all gathered in one place. The former EICs of Kotaku (Brian Crecente), Joystiq (Chris Grant), and The Escapist (Russ fucking Pitts) by themselves should have been enough. But then you throw in Arthur Gies, an utter asshole who speaks very forcefully about topics he knows nothing about since he began working at 1up, and who couldn't even hack it at IGN, as well as Justin McElroy, one of the most infamous rumor-mongers and click-grabbing flamebait shitposters on Joystiq's masthead, and it's even more reason to stay away. All the staff they've added since could be the best, most fantastic journalists ever to set fingers to keyboard, but as long as those guys up there are where the buck stops, I can't muster the slightest care.

Their website design is nigh-unnavigable shit that makes Gawker look fantastic in comparison. Their articles are frequently unreadable thanks to the artsy background images they like to throw up that often blend in with the text.

Despite their "ethics statement" which states that they will never run "advertorials", they were caught, immediately  after the "Doritogate" kerfuffle, running a barely-reworded press release from Microsoft and Pizza Hut advertising Halo 4 shit. After an edit to the page and a "we're sorry you were offended" non-apology, they just kept on truckin'. Also, that "we can change review scores after the fact" policy doesn't amount to shit when that new review score will never be reflected on aggregate sites, which are all businesses really give a shit about besides sales. That 91 for SimCity will be on the Metacritic review page forever, regardless of what the actual review text's score is changed to in order to appease GAF.

Fuck Polygon. They're the same shit games journos have always been, but with a prettier website. I do not know what people like TotalBiscuit like in them.

The original comment implied that they did not say anything about it. They did. That was the contention.

The initial review is not about being surprised or not, it's based on the experience they had with the game, which happened before all this.

Regardless of us agreeing whether the game deserved that score, that does not mean it was "paid for". I get not agreeing with the score. I have no idea if I would agree with it as I haven't played it yet. It just seems to me that the reviewer enjoyed the game.

It just seems to apply fault to a party who doesn't deserve it. EA fucked up here. The reviewers job is to review the experience of playing the game. The score is about the gameplay. They can't base a score on something that may or may not happen to an individual player at some point in time.

That's why I think they've done a great job by revising their score and posting lots of information about the situation.

I agree, but I think it's been quite a number of years since the dumbass-meter matched the review content (assuming the review does hit on the negatives).  Way back when GameSpot had black backgrounds, in fact, I stopped looking at the number and instead just read the review text.  If it listed a handful of crap designs and one or two cockstabs, I'd just ignore the 4.5/5 rating; besides that, sometimes a negative from a reviewer would be a positive for me.  The overall number was once for dumbasses, but now is for marketers and executives, and if you know any of those people you can verify that when it comes to games they are generally dumb as a sack of hammers.


High-five.  You had me at "Crescente".

I understand where they came from. It's one of the sites I visit. The video was nicely done, and I can't really see much wrong with it. It was a bit self servicing, sure.. but that's exactly what it was. Not nearly as good as the video content shit that used to be put out by the Area5 guys in the 1up Days, of course.

The only thing I am not aware of is the claim about Microsoft. If you could provide information, I'd love to see it.


I couldn't care less about Crecente and Grant. Athur Gies for the most part seems fine though. I've never really had a problem with him. It may be in part we have several shared interests, so I may have some bias there. There are times when I do want to smack the shit out of him, but that's true of anyone. McElroy. Eh. He just seems like a goof, and I can just laugh most of that off.


I wondered if this had something to do with it. I generally like their design quite a lot, so that's just going to be a major disagreement. A difference in tastes. But I'm also a design nerd. Mind you there are times when I want to yell at them at certain choices. But that happens.


I had not heard about the press release thing. Again, is there a source that you have handy?

The Metacritic issue, though, is the fault of Metacritic though, purely.

Thank you for the information. That's the kind of shit I wanted to hear besides just LAWL DEVWHORE. I appreciate you taking the time to respond. I'll look up the stuff you mentioned, but hoping you might have a handy link or two. Truly not me being lazy, just at work and fending off a bit of a cold.

I'm not going to dispute that too hard, but the thing is that the original comment was more of a general comment on gaming press who, more often than not, gave the game very, very positive reviews and said very little about any potential online issues. The only reason I'm now focusing on Polygon is because you're focusing on them.

In my mind, that particular initial review should still take into account things which they can think of would have an effect on whether or not the game is any good. And by that I don't just mean "the game, when it works", but "the game, full stop". This includes things like anticipating always-on DRM sucking dicks because the publisher or developer or whom the fuck ever are shit at anticipating load or writing stable server-side code or whatever the problem is, and tempering the review accordingly. Why? Because history has shown that this shit can and will happen on launch day/week. The only question is how badly it will crash and burn, and how much it'll affect your enjoyment down the road in, say, 2-5 years time if you still desire to fire the game up and EA has decided to shut down the server because it's "economically unfeasible to keep supporting old games".

I realize I'm asking a lot here, but this shit has been riding up my ass ever since Spore began this shitstorm of a failtrain in PC gaming, and I'm pissed people reviewing games still aren't giving publishers more shit for this than they are, pre-sales.

EA fucked up by demanding Maxis structure the game the way they did, and the reviewer fucked up by not taking history into account and realizing it not just might happen, it will happen.

I'll repeat myself, 9.5 was his initial score. It's now at 4. EA isn't the only one who fucked up here.

I'll give them the deal with revising their score, but for a lot of people that's way, way too late. Most game copies are sold within 2 days of launch, and the score was tuned down from 9.5 to 8 on launch day, and from 8 to 4 after 2 days.

That's fine. there's plenty of reason to have concern, granted. But, of course, we have to be fair when we make any claims. It's not going to do anyone any good to toss bad information about.


How much about the fact that online services have issues is a "fallacy of the maturity of chances"?

The way I look at it, the review should be about the game. I will grant that a boilerplate text of "keep in mind, the DRM may mean you don't get to play it in 5 years", that's something I wouldn't mind seeing. But, ultimately, I don't have a personal problem with them posting a review of the game experience, and then using other posts to talk about the problems with DRM, which seems most of these sites do.




Repeating yourself doesn't do much. You don't agree with the initial score. Oh well. I get that. I can't really change your mind on that. You don't like that score. I don't really CARE about that score. However, What is the problem with the fact that it is now 4? Should they have not changed it? Or is it you would prefer the original score to be a 4 based on experiences they didn't have?


The review came out the day before the release of the game. How many copies that were bought on launch day were pushed by these reviews, any reviews. The revised scores protect those that HAVEN'T bought the game yet.

Because TotalBiscuit is a complete fucking tool as well? He pretty much got ran out of the WoW board on SA.

I enjoy TB, think he's a bit of a dork and a total drama queen, but getting into a fight on an internet forum isn't really indicative of much.

Anyone who watches TB for actual reviews instead of snarky funny tipping of sacred cows is an equal tool.  The guy has only one or two genre of games he likes and everything else is 'garbage.'  I certainly wouldn't buy or not based on his reviews because his taste isn't mine. 

Which is ALWAYS the key item people forget about reviewers and why 'celebrity reviewers' or 'genre reviewers' like game mags/ sites use have never made sense to me.  You have to find someone with the same tastes as you and go from there.

TB introduced me to numerous fun indie games I'd have otherwise missed with his "WTF is" series so for that I like him.  Even if he does have a strange hard-on for options menus.

My mistake, Microsoft bankrolled the Polygon "documentary" to the tune of $750,000, confirmed by Gies (http://www.abload.de/img/untitledqndc0.png). Either way, the relationship is there.


The GAF thread (http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=497693) that initially shined a spotlight on it, and the Polygon page (http://www.polygon.com/2012/10/30/3575978/halo-4-avatar-costume-offered-free-from-u-k-pizza-huts) in question, now heavily edited. Note that for a good long while, the article's largely negative comments were deleted.

And the way I look at it, the review should be about the expected experience of playing it, and this includes potential fuckups with online resources. Otherwise they could've just released a gameplay video taken in ideal situations where nothing goes wrong, and said that's the review.

If Sim City had been a game where you could play both offline and online in some fashion, whether that is through EA's servers, setting up their own private servers, then not putting as much emphasis on the online aspect would've been fine, since that would've been an additional feature. It isn't, it's one of the core aspects of the game (that is, until someone releases some sort of proxy simulation hack), and it needs to be treated as such by the reviewer. It wasn't, it was mostly glossed over, despite having seen the effect of multiple online activation/always-on drm schemes launched by multiple companies over the last 5 years, and the problems they've almost always had the first couple of weeks.

I would've preferred if he'd have called them out harder on it pre-launch day. He didn't, he mentioned it as a sidenote and mostly glossed over the whole problem.

Actually, scratch that, I would've preferred it if the entire industry would call out anyone doing the always-on drm bullshit much harder than they are now, before the games are released. I mean, how many times do we have to see this bullshit happen, time and time again, before the industry as a whole goes "you know, maybe we shouldn't be this consumer hostile?".

Again, last I checked most purchases are done in the first 2 days after launch (preorders muddy this a bit, but preorderers most likely aren't going to heed any reviews the day prior to launch. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if you'd find the most adament defenders in that group.

It's a bit more than being a kooky internet celeb. I don't have my helldumpish log of stuff on him at my fingertips but he's pretty much a complete prick.

This is just coming from seeing the guy interact with people elsewhere on the internet besides his youtube channel though, so I guess if you just watch his videos you don't need to care. I kinda don't touch anything involving the guy anymore because I think he's an asshole.

We're suddenly SB'ing the fuck out of this thread. Good grief.

I can vouch. On the EJ benefactors boards he lasted about a week and a half. He immediately (and I'm not exaggerating on the time frame there) launched into, "DON'T YOU KNOW WHO I AM?"  and it was well, well before he broke... well, whatever "big" in internet vidya game nerd terms is called.

He's not even particularly good at what he supposedly does well.

An accurate review if you're interested.

http://www.jonathancresswell.co.uk/2013/03/review-simcity/ (http://www.jonathancresswell.co.uk/2013/03/review-simcity/)

In rubbernecking news, EA have told affiliates to stop trying to sell their game: http://www.slashgear.com/ea-tells-affiliates-to-stop-actively-promoting-simcity-08273116/


What next for SimCities of our lives I wonder!

Ahahahah. The best launch.

I legit feel sorry for the CJs in charge of the servers, but otherwise, hilarious.

Jesus. When even EA stops whoring its own game, you know shit just got REAL.

Well, he basically got forced to leave after he was shown to be a massive hypocrite. I don't know if you you know this but he stopped reporting on WoW with a big "I'm quitting WoW because casuals run everything and Blizzard should cater to us hardcore gamers" rant (back when Blizzard started tuning the Cataclysm heroics to be slightly less "fuck this shit" arbitrarily stupid and tedious). The WoW forum goons found his main - no raids, maybe half a dozen heroics run total (six months into the expansion), gear a patchwork of blues and greens.

He stopped posting at that point.  :awesome_for_real:

Hard to believe but EA put on a press event where only the press got to play before release. That's what the good reviews are based on. The fact that reviewers and their editors blindly accept that crap is more boggling than the high scores.

(http://i.imgur.com/21ca7Lt.jpg)

I think attending a review event where you know you are playing on a server reserved for the press is pretty tantamount to having the review paid for? Was mtn dew and cheetos served?

I love it when that shit happens.

I'd say this confirms my belief that this is the worst major launch of any game, ever.

Is there something wrong with me because I am enjoying this debacle? This is one of my favorite franchises, played the shit out of it through my childhood and now I think it is hilarious that it is going down in flames. Am I broken?

Best worst major launch? :grin:

I'm all for piling on EA for this - but Simcity UK is not an EA page, it's a fan page that was created yesterday.

Remember when Anet stopped selling gw2 to cut the server load when it was launched? This looks like a badly handled version of that.

If you are then I am, too.

For me, though, I think this is important. Not because it's automatically going to change things or anything but because it's shining a brighter spotlight on issues of DRM and just how much abuse gamers are willing to take (hint: it's a lot). EA won't change, ever, but it might cause a mid-sized company to rethink a DRM strategy, for instance, or drive more serious business journalism when it comes to the industry. It's shocking how little "real" journalism takes place given how much money changes hands. The gaming industry is terrible. It has terrible business practices and worse labor practices but nobody in the "real" world pays attention because GAMING. That should change and I hope this is one of the things that chips away at that mainstream reticence to look at things closely.

Opened the launcher. Waited five minutes to "authenticate". Launched. Five minutes of blackscreen doing god knows what. Intro movie. Title screen. "The SimCity servers are down. Your request cannot be processed at this time."

Quit, open Minecraft. It works fine.

The funny part is that people are pretending that all online launches are disasters, and yet City of Heroes managed to not melt its servers down in 2003. All this debacle proves is that you really can cash in on nostalgia, because EA did that and is probably back to swimming in vats of platinum.


Pretty much this.

Hmm. As X approaches Y, stop trying to sell our game.
Where X is the number of people not buying + number demanding refunds, because of the DRMs.
And Y is the number of people we predicted would pirate the game if we didn't have the DRMs.

While I'm greatly enjoying reading about the crashing and burning, because I'm a terrible person, all this talk has got me really itching for a city sim type game.  Has anyone ever tried that Anno 2070 game?  I wouldn't buy it at full price, which it still is on steam, but would pick it up on a sale if people think it's halway decent.

I'd buy Tropico4 but I hear it's just a slightly upgraded Tropico3, which I've already played a bunch of.

Edit: Hmm, coincidentally, Tropico4 is on sale for $7.50 on steam right now, maybe I'll just do that.  Still interested in first hand Anno 2070 impressions though.

Edit2: Bought Tropico4 with a bunch of dlc bundled in for ten bucks.

Keep in mind tropico 4 requires a kalypso account, and anno 2070 has solidshield tages with 3 machine activations.

2070's alright.  Don't pay full price.  Also, its still chock full of Ubi DRM; it came out shortly before Ubi said they were going to relax the DRM to death thing.

Honestly, I really would like to play THIS city manager game.  Maybe in a few weeks they'll have the fire sale to bring people scared away back.

How did CitiesXL shake out? I remember hearing it was a disaster at launch but that it got its act together eventually.

Chris Kluwe reviews (http://www.businessinsider.com/chris-kluwes-simcity-5-review-2013-3) Sim City in a spot on and hilarious fashion.

I hear it's very pretty but not actually a sim.  More of a "place very pretty stuff on a grid and take screen shots" type of thing.

Hmm, I did not know that but it only took a second using my spamcentric email alt compared to the simcity debacle.

That is fantastic.


Meh, I enjoy his schtick enough to watch a fair few of his videos. His style doesn't bother me so much, the fact that he's fairly terrible at games does. He has some very valid criticisms to make that perhaps sometime get lost in the froth of is personality. I haven't found many other youtube reviewers who I enjoy more.

The Tropico devs are going on the offensive.

(http://i.imgur.com/JyZi94a.png)

I played Tropico 1 a looooong time ago.  I think it's time to return.  Fucking sold.

The kalypso thing is just something you sign in once to launch the game, it's not very intrusive at all. I actually play Tropico 4 a lot and like it.

From Destructoid: EA: "SimCity's broken because it's just too much fun!" (http://www.destructoid.com/ea-simcity-s-broken-because-it-s-just-too-much-fun--248186.phtml)


This goes great with their review they debuted today: 4/10 (http://www.destructoid.com/review-simcity-248039.phtml).  

GameTrailers was more "understanding", with an 8/10 (http://www.gametrailers.com/reviews/d9c3kh/simcity-review).

This has now also lowered the MetaCritic to 76.

Anno 2070 is alright but the DRM is really annoying even though it does kinda sorta work...  Its got some bugs and the cities are fairly simple although the underwater aspect is interesting.  For the price its not bad all said and done. I bought Tropico and this is the first one I have played. I am far preferring it over Anno 2070 right now.

I was actually looking forwards to simcity until I have watched this debacle unfold. I am curious what this is going to do to EA's stock price. Maybe if their stock takes a dump someone will notice what idiotic decisions they have been making.  Although I am not going to hold my breath on that one.

EA's stock price has actually risen by 50 cents over the last 5 days  :drill:

Nevermind!

Hilarious though it is, that's already in the thread.

I have it and enjoy the heck out of it. Even bought the expansion. Got it for half price and it logs you into uplay every time you play but you can play it in offline mode if you want.

Pretty much everything has.

Did someone post the "loading" review for the third time?   :why_so_serious:

You sure about this? I have Omerta and it logs in every time I launch the game. Doesnt matter much as I registered from a disposable GMail account. For all the fuss about Uplay it basically works the same for me.

There's a number of unintentionally funny things in that Press Reset documentary (e.g. the first company they show Polygon presenting themselves to is EA's PR department, Russ Pitts' has an interview with someone who lives on the same street as he does) but overall it's very dull. You can't make people working on websites look exciting.

Regarding SimCity: it's almost the perfect case for game journalists writers playing the game under manufactured conditions and forgiving the faults, then the game crashing into reality. Polygon got to run early with their very friendly review and now they're being bashed with it.

Reviews encourage people to buy a title. Polygon told people they should buy this game. They were wrong.  :awesome_for_real:

Maxis: Free game for SimCity owners (http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/03/09/maxis-apologizes-offers-simcity-players-free-ea-game)


So...free copies of Madden '04 for everyone?   :uhrr:

Fake edit: Forbes: The return of disgruntled anonymous employees ranting about EA's failures! (http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2013/03/08/ea-employee-chastizes-company-over-simcity-in-public-letter/)

The free game is another delicious opportunity to fail. They could show believable remorse and offer new games like Crysis 3, or they could flip the bird and offer, well, Madden '04.

"Hey Peter. Whaaaat's happening."

"Oh, hi, Mr. Lumburgh, I was just finishing up my TPS report. I'll get that cover sheet put on it this time."

"Yeah, Peter. That's not why I'm here this time."

"Oh?"

"Peter, I see you have an EA corporate logo coffee mug on your desk."

"Yes, sir, that's my coffee mug."

"Can I take a look see? I just want to see something here ..."

*turns mug around in his hands*

"Yeah, Peter, this says Act with Integrity."

"So?"

"Well Peter, you think you're anonymous, but it turns out, this is the only coffee mug with this particular slogan on it."

"Oh."

"And this little smudge on the bottom? Yeah. That's an RFID chip."

"I see."

"Peter, these gentlemen are named Hor-hay and ... Jamaal, is it? Yeah. These nice men are going to escort you to the front door. Have a good day. Buh bye."

EA Maxis head honcho'ete Lucy Bradshaw will be gracing the SimCity Twitter feed today from 1200 PM PST to 1245.  She also made some comments to Polygon regarding offline mode, which basically surmounted to her saying "Nope".

http://www.polygon.com/2013/3/9/4081464/simcity-interview-ea-maxis-lucy-bradshaw

Let's just see how much "computation" is "in the cloud" (god, I wish I could smack her right in the face for saying those 3 words) when/if someone makes a proxy EA server emulation thingy.

Indeed, they exist in 2 sqkm rectangles.

However I must admit that EA has made the game playable for me today. It's definitely Simcity lite, but so streamline that it's really enjoyable to play. The disabled social features do drag it down somewhat, and there's a whole dimension of intercity trading that doesn't seem to work much atm.

The smoking gun of incompetence.  

They really don't trust their customers.  I could somehow understand it in an MMO, but this is single-player sim game.  I guess all the juicy MT $ they wanted got in the way of delivering to customers.

Yeah you just sign log your info, then save it. The steam launcher brings up the kalypso thing with your saved info, you click start. It's not always online, nor does it have any windows or overlays or anything else.

(http://i.imgur.com/Bsul6h4.jpg)

Also, all those "cloud calculations" apparently haven't addressed a bug from SimCity 4, where traffic essentially will always take the shortest, most direct path, regardless of all other conditions, such as better/multi-lane roads:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=zHdyzx_ecbQ

This video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g418BSF6XBQ) is a better example of why it's retarded.

Oh man, no wonder traffic was constantly stuck in my game.

So, never played the Tropico games at all -- i see the Tropico 4 bundle is like 10 bucks on Steam. I was futzing around with SimCity 4 -- Tropico worth getting? Any fun?

I grabbed it for $10 last night.  Downloaded overnight, will play when I get home from my 12-hour shift.  Looking forward to it.  :awesome_for_real:

I have no personal experience, but the SO has devoured Tropico 4 and all the DLC, she's got maybe 150 hours in. All I know is that the music is good and the political caricatures amusing.

Then...sold! :)

Plus, you know, sale. :)

Yeah, they eventually patched out the irritating DRM, IIRC (it was for Most ubi games, but I don't know which didn't make the cut)

I've put a stupid number of hours into Anno 2070. I recall that playing fully offline means you can't use saved upgrades in your ship though.

My short BIIF - Yes, buy it.

The game is a simple city builder based on island economics. You start by building roads and farms and mines. You can expand your operations by educating your citizens with high schools and colleges. You'll need thing like doctors for health care and high school grads as soldiers and factory workers. Factories convert your farmed or mined goods into high prices items. You control the traffic flow through Teamsters, Garages, and road planning to get to your docks. Once off the the docks and on freighters you make your money.

Meanwhile you play the dictator. Your soldiers battle against rebel attacks. Natural disasters and fires have to be put out by firemen. You can issue edicts and laws to benefit yourself. You can suck money out of certain banks and other buildings to your Swiss Bank account. Also, each citizen has their own rankings, job skill levels, thoughts, needs, and daily routines. They belong to different factions that can fight you or make demands. You have outside foreign powers making demands for goods or offering foreign aid. You can choose to side with the US or the Russians in an arms race. Meanwhile it's all set to music that will have you tapping your toes as you gleefully build your empire of bananas.

I tried Anno 2070 yesterday, beautiful game but the so called plot made me cringe in the first campaign mission. I was surprised to have a warship, is there a lot of military strategizing in that game?

Warships are mostly used as escorts from pirates, since you have to setup trade routes to get past tier 2 or so islands.

Use the campaign to kind of start learning the systems, then abandon it and play the global missions (if they're still going, it was a really neat idea imo) and skirmish type sandbox games.

The reality argument.  In a game with godzilla, zombie attacks and vast tracks of nothing in between tiny perfectly square cities.  Good show.

Probably won't happen but I hope the game gets cracked so that we can see how little their servers actually do.  Although we sort of already know, since anything that is broken or slow is server side.  So they save state, which could be done locally better, and they deal with inter city exchanges, which could also be done locally if they all belong to the same person.

Dragon Age 2 didn't meet their sales numbers, so this would be a great chance to off-load some of that old, unsold stock!

Well I played a couple hours or so of Tropico 4, made a couple save files, and then quit.  Now when I restart it can't find any of those.  So I guess games being wiped out isn't purely a sim city problem.

EA stock report, Stock down about 2 cents today from opening but has been fairly stable most of today. This does not seem to be hurting them any on the Stock casino.

http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=EA+Interactive#symbol=EA;range=1d

That's the "no refunds" part  :awesome_for_real:

Got in a few hours' worth of Simcitying today. The game is rather buggy and marred by bad design (eg. tile based buildings and freeform roads combining to make anything else except a square grid unoptimal), but it's good fun nonetheless. I dunno what I would think had I paid for it though.

Played some myself, then got booted in a coup.

Couldn't seem to control crime, kept having complaints about the Army -- couldn't even figure out how to make my army happier! I was finally bringing in money (my raw materials export business had taken off). I was frantically trying to jump-start tourism and get a college going.

Also, in retrospect -- perhaps a power plant would have been nice. :)

I've been playing this game. A big godzilla-style lizard appeared and blew up my nuclear power plant, making half the city radioactive and unlivable. You can't clean up the radiation, revert to a former save or turn off disasters. Turns out you can't actually delete the city either, so the region I'm playing in is stuck with a permanently borked city. It's annoying.

Well, somewhere has to be Japan on their servers.  :drill:

Does nobody actually sit their asses down and, you know, design these damn things anymore?

I realize EA's all about a clone-a-year until the well runs dry, then blame piracy on it, but damn. Half the features of SimCity -- as working correctly -- irritate the shit out of me as a player. No pure local mode? Always online? No turning disasters off? Curvy roads without curving zones and buildings?

And they still haven't fixed traffic routing? The logic isn't that damn hard, even for autonomous agents.

I realize like...70%, minimum, of the annoying or gamebreaking shit was obviously a 'We want an always-on anti-piracy measure, justify it in game play" and that was the best they could do. But it's also pretty obvious that there's a lot of people not asking "Is this fun?" when it comes to games.

Or more likely, no longer willing to listen to testers when they say "While this may be an awesome feature you worked hard on, it sucks balls and is annoying".

Tried playing again tonight. The server I'd made a city on before hung at Authenticating for ~10 minutes so I picked a new one. I managed to log in, tried to create a new Region, got as far as Claim City then an error saying I was unable to claim a city and to try again. I tried 5 times before giving up.

I don't think they are necessarily trying to justify it, rather they are trying to offload enough to make it more difficult to crack.

The irony is what little they did offload was still too much  :awesome_for_real:

Metacritic score falls to 71 thanks to Qt3 and PC Gamer.

http://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2013/03/08/this-is-the-one-star-simcity-review/

http://www.pcgamer.com/review/simcity-review/

Fake edit: From Reddit:


 :why_so_serious:

I was waiting for that. It was pretty obviously only a matter of time before disaffected players and people who enjoy griefing worked out a suitable mechanism.

Which is actually kind of funny, because Tropico 4 stores files locally.

In a GiantBomb/Gamespot video (the new releases thingie) they found out that it's possible to build parks in other people's cities, using the victim's money. I haven't tried it myself so it might've been patched out,  but I doubt it.

Well, this multiplayer thing is new for the industry, nobody's really ever encountered players doing things to...what did you call it, grief? that's a good term. You have to be fair here--this is completely new territory for game development, who could have guessed that players might take advantage of a multiplayer design to cause trouble for other players!

(http://i.minus.com/iRs9swTjXxWnz.gif)

5/5 - Would read again.

Ditto. I wonder how they're going to fix that one.  Maybe a city that hasn't been logged-in to in x number of days gets deleted.  Surely that won't cause any outcry.

Though now that I think on it...cities where you can take out bonds, bankrupt the city, make it impossible for anyone to do anything about it, and eventually create a region that is unplayable...

You have to give EA/Maxis credit for their hardcore commitment to realism.

Either that, or for copying the plot of Robocop 2

lol i really want a RoboCop DLC for SimCity now.

(http://t0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRA8yGvfjrXr02XLRTGll-IS9gH_IhrVjQ7Bxljg3CLT3519FRAAg)
Someone had to ...

So, played this a bit over the weekend. This game is pretty broken, and I don't just mean the online part. There's plenty of mundane bugs, like recycling centers and trade depots just randomly breaking, and all kinds of mechanics wonkiness, such as the educational system. (Hint: once you unlock a higher-tier school, you can bulldoze the lower-tier ones; SC2013 students don't discriminate by age group.)

Let's not even get into the broken traffic/commuting/regional trading system. The only thing I managed to consistently trade was sewage coverage, everything else seems to fuck up randomly.

It's the game for our times.

Shouldn't that unlock some sort of stadium or convention centre?  :why_so_serious:

I Was under the impression you could lock a region when you started it, and make it invite/friends only.

Anyway, Tropico 4 is awesome.

You can. When you start a region, there's a radio button: Public or Private. It defaults to Public and plenty of naive casual gamers are leaving their regions open.

The predictable griefpocalypse is well underway.

I wonder how many shitty launches and undersold games need to come out before EA is like "We're sorry Valve, we're bad at fucking everything so I don't know why we decided to compete."

I'd say they're pretty good at fucking everything.

I want to see EA ask to get their games placed back on Steam and have Steam turn them down for reasons like that zombie game.

The system for buying utilities from the region is utterly broken it seems. I have my industrial city pumping out 100MW of extra power, but when I move to the buying city it shows there is 30MW available, of which it uses 17MW, and half the city is without power.

The same technical failures that are evident here would be exactly the same if they sold it through Steam instead. Origin seems to be the only part of this that works - it will sell the game and install it for you just fine.  :-P

No, because steam would have pulled it by now.

Now sporting a jaunty 68 on Metacritic! (http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/simcity)

I genuinely wonder how it will take them to say All Clear.  Particularly when so many people are probably not even trying to log in play.


Edit: 66!

If the great minds at Eurogamer Sweden gave it a perfect 100 who are we to judge otherwise?

Just saw an ad for Sim city on SYFY channel!  :drill:

EA stock report; EA stock price rose about 40 cents due to a massive volley of trading that started around Mar 11th 11:15 EDT

Who ever said that the stock market is divorced from reality  :grin:

The DOW's up almost 500 points on the month. EA's stock is just riding the overall wave. Investors have no idea, nor do they care about the reporting on one game.

Was just amusing in light of the EA stock price crashing predictions earlier.

Shrug its probably going to take a few more games than SimCity tanking before it budges the stock price. One could hope though  :why_so_serious:

I saw a couple commercials for SimCity with the guy from workaholics and honestly they were pretty much meh. If Maxis patches the city size / include offline mode I MAY look at this game. Otherwise its just another series from my childhood that gets written off and ignored.

You're right. It would take a few more. Thing is, their releases in Q1 2013 were Dead Space 3, Crysis 3, and this. I'm not seeing any huge totals coming in their earnings report from those releases. When that happens? Likely investors will start to get worried. The only thing that may save them is a Tiger Woods 2014 game, or an Army of Two sequel. However, the last Tiger Woods game got hammered for their RMT bullshit.

It could get ugly real fast if the numbers over the next two quarters suck.

RMT in golf game...
hmmm...

That's just realism at work.  :why_so_serious:

(Seriously though, golf is fucking expensive.)

Also judging from Tiger Woods' career, it's expensive fucking.

Only if you're dumb enough to get married and think you can continue shagging everything tossing itself at you.

If he'd only pulled a Clooney...

Pretty much anything involving regional trade is utterly broken. Power, water and sewage are less broken than commuters, shoppers, tourists and students, and those are even less broken than services.

Do not ever try to run a city larger than about 5000 people on borrowed services. It will end in tears. And flames. Lots of flames.

If you're playing with a buddy, you can force Origin to update your local copy of the buddy's city by going to the region and "visiting" that city. This seems to get you a more-recent snapshot of the city. I tried playing with a buddy over the weekend and managed to successfully sell him about 50MW of power while sending him all my sewage.

I tried a bit more last night and realized that the game is really, really predicated on its traffic system. Also, the RCI meters are useless and broken, don't use them. Instead, use the population panel and do your best to balance out your vacant jobs, unsold goods, and unemployed people. By growing slowly and keeping a close eye on services, I've gotten up to 90k population, and without any serious traffic issues until about 60k. I'm transitioning the city from being based on

Freight deliveries are utterly broken; you generate effectively infinite freight demand by having any power plant in the city, at all. A small (5-7 midsize factory) industrial sector will gladly employ an entire town of low/mid-density residents.

Upgrade to high-density slowly, one street at a time. When you pop a high-density street in an area that's ready to upgrade, you'll temporarily lose a shitton of revenue as high-density buildings take forever to build and, while they're under construction, they generate no revenue. I had sudden giant holes in my budget that I covered with buffer cash when I upgraded a long street and had a quarter of my population temporarily disappear. Also, let the immigrant traffic jam disperse before doing more, or else you'll have days of gridlock.

Also, for education, you only need either a high school or a college/university in your city. Students aren't graded into educational bands, so you don't need to pass them up the chain from grade school to high school to college. If you're not going for high-tech industry, it's way cheaper to just have an expanded high school, which will still educate your sims up to 3 mortarboards - enough for a nuclear power plant, reduced resource usage (solar roofs) and recycling.

But all of this is just working around weird quirks and flaws in the game itself. Half of it wouldn't be necessary if RCI demand made sense, if the various production/consumption values were balanced, and if the traffic system weren't so heavily flawed. Oh, and if their online systems weren't such a huge pile of garbage.

I'm getting very rich making electronic goods. This involves buying alloy and plastic, using these to manufacture processors and using the processors and more alloy and plastic to manufacture TVs and computers.

I did have lower level industry (mines and smelting) in my city, but I have deleted them and just ship in all my raw materials from the global market, and then sell the final products back to the global market at a profit.

I have no idea if the global market is at all related to anything any other player is doing or if the game simply generates raw materials, and demand for new TVs, for my benefit.

As with everything else involving multiplayer, the global market is currently fucked. Prices aren't fluctuating at all.

Don't forget to build a recycling center; you can get a lot of plastic and alloy out of your city and reduce your reliance on garbage dumps/incinerators with a recycling center in the right location.

You're forgetting the buckets of revenue they'll get from this year's release of Madden, FIFA and NCAA Football. Those fucking games if not profitable at the very least are "keep the lights on" money.

Those are Q3 or Q4 releases. The panic will have already set in by then if the earnings are shit.

Quite sure EA is "To big to fail" in that...what ever, they are EA.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/03/12/simcity-server-not-necessary/
Sounds like their DBAs and backend code are atrocious.

No that's actually a good design (but poor capacity planning). Do as much as possible asynchronously -- keeps the client from being bogged down by slow synchronous requests to the server.

I will not disagree with that.  Sorry I should be more specific.  What makes no sense is that they couldn't predict that it wouldn't scale well on what they allocated when it went live.  Their transaction backend code must be poorly optimized.  Wonder how they index the databases and what the performance hit is when stuff is looked back up online.  If the transaction code was good one would think they should have just been able to allocate more infrastructure and alleviate the problem in a shorter time window.  Wonder how much bad Origin infrastructure design is at fault here that they had to tie in with.  Wouldn't the fact they turned off this Cheetah mode and cut the queue updates in half seems to indicate some type of major infrastructure/design fault beyond not enough servers. Performance issues on server transactions generally shouldn't be off by 50%.

Also doesn't help that a lot of general stuff seems to be broken from numerous gamers reporting glitches or traffic/population problems.  Game should have had more time before release and better beta testing.

I won't pretend to know anything about server infrastructure but it might be worth noting that the servers are not exactly live and are only supposed to update every three minutes (see http://www.simcity.com/en_US/game/info/live-service).

Which - I would have thought - means they only need to receive data from each city every three minutes too (more often would be a waste?). I mean, the server may collect information from the client more often because I guess it may get one bit of data at a time (eg population, wealth) rather than a snapshot of the entire city in one go, but then it would still only need to grab each bit of data from each city once every three minutes - regardless of whether that data had changed a lot or a little in that period (ie regardless of the speed the game is running client side)?

Sims are broken.

http://answers.ea.com/t5/Miscellaneous-Issues/Traffic-quot-AI-quot-This-is-why-services-and-traffic-are-broken/m-p/737060

Well, no.   I've been playing ME since the release of Sim City.   A lot more disconnects, Origin isn't running so, therefore, we're gonna close ME now (just to see my Origin screen right after ME closes), and you not getting credits whenever you deserve them.   Get your damn Sim City nonsense outta my ME.

So much as I like the autonomous agents concept, it is the last fucking thing in the world I would try on any sort of conventional multiplayer/server setup. It absolutely demands to be done entirely client-side--it has enough complexities and messiness all by itself before you try to network it extensively. I am now thinking that this is two levels of totally separate cock-up: EA's stupidity about always-on DRM *and* a crazy level of hubris about modeling and simulation from a dev team that understood what some of the cool conceptual shit around people doing artificial societies modeling was but who tried to implement it in a scale and design that is about a million steps beyond anything anyone's tried.

LOL@ ME fail caused by SC.
Talk about domino effect.
But u haf no pruf. >:( EA foreva.

It's a nice lemmings simulator (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=-d0b41H-Lnk)

It's the gift that keeps on giving!

Like herpes!

Wait, does this mean that me having to wait more than two minutes until origin decides it lets me run Mass Effect has something to do with the Sim City server issues?

I was wondering why the "checking for installed add-ons" and "connecting to origin" steps took so awfully long.

Jeff Kelly,

It's nice to see EA customers having fun and wanting to log-in so often into one of our fantastic games they own.
But they have to understand that these issues are not connected at all, and the only thing that is common for both games are that they are both very popular amongst the fans. Hence an extra load is expected on our log-in servers whenever such mega-hit games receive the attention of die hard fans. Mass Effect 3 MP DLC: Reckoning, the last FREE release content may have caused that extra delay in your log-in services.

Stay strong, Jeff Kelly and keep up the good fight.
Admiral Hackett

Population levels are also padded, seems like in a big city only about 10% of the population are actual sims. And that is already enough to clog up everything!

http://www.reddit.com/r/SimCity/comments/1a5pof/did_ea_lie_about_theoretical_population_sizes/

Nonsense. EA never lies. Why the false accusations bro?  :why_so_serious:

This whole "Agents take the shortest route" stuff feels like something was hobbled as an "Optimization" due to the server based nature, if the game truly is closer to a dumb terminal like they claim. An actor not needing to make a division check on road type in pathing would be a significant reduction, same with the "goes to first open house".

Except they're ending up in a queue, and likely recalculating over and over.  They'd be better off with a random chance of destination, which closer slots having a slightly higher occurrence.  Don't let the sim recalculate its destination, only its path after X amount of time.

I went from A to B. You are saying C may be better. I say, no shit. That was not my point :) I think they had a much more full simulation planed, but trimmed it down and now it shows the behavior people are seeing. Shortest line, ETC.. Any "actor" in a building is no longer an "actor", its a variable of a building, no decision points, not pathing, no automation. So shortest and least amount of decision points the better. I also recall in earlier videos the simulation being much larger in much larger cities.

All the calculations for traffic and the like are done client side, though - any trimming back is most likely so that they could put '2GB RAM' and 'GeForce 7800' (a seven-year old video card) on the back of the box as the minimum system requirements so that Grandma can run it on her PoS $399 Dell.

You sure that's not just prediction/Reaction to already sent updates? And I meant Decision, not division  in that quote. oops.


As for the whole, "I don't really have 2 million sims walking around". That's a no brainier. Actors in the buildings are fine, you do not really need 2m sims. A fraction of that would still feel right. Things like 4 of them are in a car, 20 on a buss, 3k in a building, ETC.. The odd part to me is it seems to only happen with that one house/building type, sounds like a bug.

Still, I think there was a much grander plan originally, but the origin/DRM intentions got in the way, clearly.

The server, by EA's own admission, only sends/receives updates from your client every three minutes or so.

It's possible to keep playing your active city just fine from anywhere between twenty minutes to nearly an hour with no internet connection, and thus no updates to or from the server, so all the pathing is done on your end.

Sounds to me like there was an executive requirement to implement some kind of autonomous sim movement, but not to make the sim movement do anything that would, well, actually make it worthwhile. The whole point of having them travel would be to link them to a specific house and them have them determine if they want to keep living there or move closer to work or further away to avoid crime. All those things that go into living and commuting in an urban/suburban life. Instead it's just silliness that clogs the servers.

Except going by the link from the previous page (http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/03/12/simcity-server-not-necessary/) what they claim is far from the truth. And the tests done with running the game for quite a while without issues while lacking the intrawebs connection seem to confirm that.

(http://i.imgur.com/gmZvQoZ.png)

Should've just stuck with a statistical simulation and given us huge cities.  Instead we get a crude agent sim that lacks any agent persistence and dumb looking tiny cities.  Glassbox is a bust.

Here is a video that shows the problem. All Sims leaving work drive to a single, isolated house  - simply because it's the nearest. Of course only the first Sims actually get in, which doesn't stop the entire enchilada already enroute to drive there and try it anyway:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDeSRdHvefw


Second video, same issue:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=WH-CdkSqDSs

Perhaps that's the key to this entire thing here. Visual representation is not what matters and why city's can go on unconnected. Because the simulation part is still just numbers ALA 3. Mabye the servers just sanity check ( And disperse updates ) the last 3 minutes. That does however suggest the games not as dumb terminal as they have claimed.

Yeah, Glad I went with Tropico 4. That looks like no fun at all. Sim city, where city planing means fuckall!

http://mashable.com/2012/08/13/simcity-detailed-simulations/

Fast forward 6 months.  I believe the message has come through loud and clear on simulating a city:  Fuck. This shit be hard yo!

I was kind of interested in this title a while ago.

These videos showing just how phoned in the AI and mechanics are so horrible I don't see how you could fix that.

It's a different kind of game. Just need to learn how to play it all over.

For example Sims don't really need commercial or industrial for happiness. Just make parks and lower taxes.  Ezmode city design ftw.
http://www.reddit.com/r/SimCity/comments/1a7iqq/apparently_commercial_and_industrial_zones_are/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACdu1ho2Ic4

Or you can just optimize roads like the pros if you want a big city.

Bonus example of hilarious police state fail.

Did some code really get leaked?!
http://www.reddit.com/r/SimCity/comments/1a5pof/did_ea_lie_about_theoretical_population_sizes/c8uqv8v

(http://i.imgur.com/Vr7wV8C.png)

Ouch.

To me the AI problems smack of making a decision, getting really invested in it, and refusing to reconsider it once it proves to be unworkable.

The idea of everyone in the game actually being simulated is really cool. It would also be incredibly CPU expensive to do, so naturally you need some shortcuts. Unfortunately they needed so many shortcuts that it makes the game bad and also fails to accomplish the original high-level goal of simulating people - the simulation is so bad it can't even be called a "simulation."

Making the game systems work based on simulation of actual actors is a pretty fucking crazy idea to be honest - it hinges entirely on the behavior of the individuals coalescing into a recognizable system. People know how cities operate - writing agent AI that as a whole ends up working like a city is close to impossible. If your pathfinding is somewhat off now you have fires right next to the fire station, police cars randomly circling the same block while crime runs rampant, etc, and since you have no systems model other than individual behavior there's no easy fix.

The game is fundamentally not a city simulation - it's an shitty AI actor simulation in a city locale. A city simulation necessarily has to be more abstract.

I think this thing would work if the actors were the focus - if the game was "Sim Alien Ant Farm" where the agents were creatures of some sort and how they interacted was the interesting part of the game, without any expectations for how their society should function. (With a smaller number of actors so they could run reasonable AI)

To the man with a hammer everything looks like a nail and to the Sims team every Sim games looks like The Sims I guess. The more I think about it the more I'm convinced the approach is simply fundamentally unworkable as a city sim.

On the plus side, I had no interest in buying Sim city in the first place but saw someone mention Tropico, realised it was on sale for a ridiculously cheap price and now have been playing obsessively to the point of even ignoring Starcraft 2...

Even beyond all those terribad issues, the small square cities just look sucky. At this point we should have huge swaths of land with all kinds of cool features to build around.

This. The small city size is the reason I didn't buy it. I decided to hold off and see how things would shake out. EA already would have my money. Now I don't see any reason for me to buy it at all even if they straighten out all the server issues.

I'm choking on so much delicious popcorn.

There are already games like Tropico and CotN where there are little people doing their little people things. You can follow a dude in Tropico 4's life, watch him grow up, decide to go to high school, graduate, get a high-school-requiring-job, look at his family (who all have histories and skills of their own), etc. Fuck, you could do that in Tropico 1! Given the tiny space you're given to build your city in SimCity V, they could've managed it, I am pretty sure. I am sure that's the bigger reason people are pissed it doesn't work anything like that. If you're going to cut down on city size so you can have little people wandering around without destroying someone's computer, you need it to work like the other city builders that have smaller cities and little dudes.

Haha totally. I hope they never fix it and everyone keeps screaming about it. Mostly because fuck EA.

Same.

I assume that the Tropico guy is driven by the simulation rather than driving it. Or put another way, his actions are an expression of the underlying simulation rather than the definition.

If you have a working simulation based on systemic models you can populate your world with actors that jive with the results of the simulation. The problem with Sim City is that there are no underlying systems separate from the actions of the individual actors.

There was an old came called Startopia (available on GOG.com!) where you could follow your workers around and watch them do all their little things if you wanted. It was great. But you had less than a hundred of them. Following your guys around isn't that innovative an idea. But in a simcity game you don't want that level of detail, simply because keeping track of it all would tax a supercomputer, and would limit the size of the cities you could run in any case. You are basically using massive amounts of grunt on a rarely used gimmick.

So I've just come back from almost a week of work-related travel suck, and the first thread I see when I get back here is this thread.

All I can say is: Aahahahahahahhahahahahahahahaha

Yeah, absolutely.  Despite what some are saying about how it's lazy programming and such, the problem of simulating the pathing for an entire population, with collision, with an environment that can change at any time, is incredibly hard.  Like, fuck, I wouldn't want to touch that shit.  And that should have been pretty obvious pretty quickly.  I'm sure the decision was made at a high level due to the popularity of The Sims and such, but if you have to sacrifice citizens actually having a static home and place of work, then I think it would be obvious to anyone that it isn't worth it.  Pretty blatant disconnect between the people making the decrees and the people able to talk about what is actual possible/working (which is obviously a common problem, but seems extremely bad here).

I don't really buy the argument that the "simulate everything" approach falls down because of computational limits.  Computers are fucking fast these days, and simulation of a bunch of dudes spread over a large area is a perfect application for multiple cores/CPUs, which are usually underutilized despite being fairly ubiquitous in modern PCs.

I did a quick Google for "crowd pathfinding" and found this guy (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4W1zSOLr_g) who says that his system works with a million NPCs on an arbitrarily complex map, and that it does things that Sim City apparently doesn't, like have the NPCs avoid congestion (duuuuuhhhh).  And that's something one guy just knocked together to play with after reading a paper on pathfinding that he thought was cool; there's probably plenty of room to optimize and expand it if you threw a development team at it.  Most of the other stuff a Sim does is very simple from a computational perspective; managing a few desire sliders and a queue of actions and whatever is not like cracking the Enigma code.

This whole thing reeks of dev/design clusterfuck that was rushed out the door.  It's not that they were too ambitious, or too lazy, it's that they had a bunch of conflicting requirements and internal fuckery combined with an unrealistic deadline.

Those NPCs are all going to the same place, though.

As far as congestion avoidance goes that doesn't matter at all, because the density of each section of road is still common to all of the NPCs regardless of whether they're all going to the same place.

For the specific application of SimCity there are lots of ways that you could optimize -- at different times of day sims are going to different types of buildings, so you build path maps to those buildings (which is going to be a relatively small subset of your entire city) and all the sims going to a particular building share the same map.  You also don't need to update the traffic maps every millisecond, because in real life people don't react instantly to traffic conditions; doing a pass every few seconds is going to be more than good enough to get very lifelike behavior.  And again, you can parallelize the shit out of all that.

This is all armchair commentary of course and I'm sure they had all kinds of hassles and requirements to deal with; I'm just saying it's not some giant fundamentally uncrackable nut.

It's been a while I played Tropico, but it's the opposite from what I remember -- the overall state of the city/country is determined by performance/actions of individual agents. Mind you, the populations don't exceed few hundred 'people', but that's in game made literally over ten years ago and running comfortably on machines of that time.

Yeah, I call bullshit on it -- it's lazy agent programming. (It's possible -- probable, in fact -- that they wanted to avoid emergent behavior and keep the Sims doing what they 'should' as simulation agents). That first empty slot shit is absolute BS.

You don't solve the problem that way unless you're out of time to solve it at all (and given how core it is, they must have put it the fuck off) or you ran into insurmountable problems -- which should have been identified early enough to find a much better solution than a hack like that.

Hell, store 'favorite routes' and only reroute if congestion is particularly high for a length of time -- then you only have to pathfind a fraction of the time. (otherwise it follows it's fastest/shortest/most scenic/whatever route). And if it has to recalculate, trigger a work/home assesment -- bad traffic is a often a reason people move or change jobs, and they can either move or pick an alternate route.

Pathfinding isn't that hard, you're not looking for optimal paths --- just good ones.

The fact that everyone and their brother is able to come up with better designs off the top of their head goes back to them clearly just running out of time and having to rush something the fuck out the door.  Which, again, I'm guessing is just horrible management more than anything.

It's like that in CotN too. Your city depends on your workers getting to where they need to be, including getting to places where needs (goods and worship, mostly) are filled.

If doing something like CotN or Tropico would melt down mighty supercomputers if done on a SC4-scale, then they should've ditched the idea rather than city size, since apparently people that aren't me play SimCity to build gigantic fucking cities (I like smaller cities, always have!). Instead, they cut back on city-size ... and then still failed to do the Tropico-thing. It's like the worst of both worlds.

I do like being able to follow around people in tropico, figure out if they like me, and then have them arrested if they are bitching about my environmental policy.

jesus fucking CHRIST this game is fucked.

when work gets out in the evening, every sim leaving work automatically starts to head towards the nearest house with capacity. Even if that house gets filled to capacity in the interim, they'll still drive all the way there before going all "hurr oops guess i better walk over here now"

they have no place of residence. no memory. no goals. no established residence or place of work.

traffic is fucked. left turn lanes don't exist in simworld. entire cities have been ruined by the inability of a major intersection to permit left turns.

game's fucked. no sympathy for people who preordered it.

EA: Too big to succeed.

Maxis has to have a lot of the blame here as well. Most maybe.

I got nothin except to chime in with Margalis nailed it.  Mo popcorn.

Not from my understanding of the game, no. Immigrants turn up at the docks with a set of skills, likes &'dislikes and possible family. If there's an opening that matches those they will take it, but if not the become unemployed and then criminals. The type of  job they will take depends on their education level and skills, and that then determines the type of housing they can afford. It is possible through education to improve their education level so they can take on different jobs, but this can cause you problems as well - provide education to everyone on your island and you'll have no-one to run your farms, mines and transport agencies that require unskilled labor.

Tl;dr - no, the individual actors in Tropico are generated and you then have to build your island around them to make it successful. Whilst they can change over time based on your islands facilities, they are not just a reflection of the state of the island but independant actors with needs.

Last I looked, which admittedly was in a let's play tropico 4 deal, there weren't that many "people" in your island, so there's not that much to simulate there.

How many do you consider "many?"

You could do something like SimCity Societies, where you have your little actors but the population at large is abstracted. So a house will spawn two Sims to go do their actor shit, but it also represents forty people in population or whatever.

Basically I'm not sure people really expected to have populations of thousands and thousands of people simulated at once, but once they saw how small cities were going to be, I think they assumed they'd at least be getting what existed in Tropico 1, a game from freaking 2001, rather than a bunch of hobos that are SO stupid it breaks the game.

No, there aren't. Tropico absolutely deals on a much smaller, micro level than Sim city.

But the issue is that SimCity promised Tropico style sims - and completely failed on that. At the same time, they broke the macro level stuff as well that SimCity is based around so ultimately you get the worse of both worlds - you neither have the intricate, small scale detail to follow like in Tropico and as was promised for SimCity, and you also don't have the grand macro level city design that is the essence of SimCity.

Add on top of that the fact the fundamental systems in the game are completely broken and you're left with easily the biggest turkey of the last few years (since Elemental in fact!). How this was missed interviews is utterly beyond me - even more so than usual this is inexcusable.

What I would consider many would certainly exceed a few hundred, or even a few thousand. As I said, I've just watched a tropico 4 let's play to see what I was missing out on due to the account requirement, so I'm not sure how high up that goes, but I don't remember noticing the population number going too far above 150-200.

But just going back a bit on the reviews a bit, I find it interesting that there are so many things becoming blatantly apparent which apparently a lot (or all?) of the reviewers missed, beyond just the "hurr always online" requirement.

I could understand reviewers missing PS3 Skyrim's faults initially - they only became apparent 25+ hours in, and so initial scores didn't detect them. They should have gone back and adjusted the scores once that issue was found, but the numbers made sense.

I could understand reviewers not getting the ME3 ending - either because they didn't play it to completion (again, 25+ hours required) or because they hadn't played the other games and so didnt understand what a fuck up it was.

But what I cannot understand is reviewers missing the fundamental broken aspects of this game. furthermore, to take Polygon's review in poin:







Russ Pitts, the guy who wrote that review, is a corrupt con artist who lies to the public for cash. That's the only reasonable explanation behind that review.

This is my surprised face:  :oh_i_see:

whsdlkgh


http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Bmce9oIxJag

Um. Is it just me or is that city size 1/5th or something of the biggest SC4 city?

ain't you. sim city 5 limits you to a miserably small parcel of land.

(http://i.minus.com/ilPrUhB9dfjvn.gif)

Also, not only is the game entirely capable of working offline and letting you have large city sizes, but here's how the guy who modded the game supposedly did it.

lol.

(http://i.imgur.com/cPW7Krk.jpg)

It's not just sites of questionable reputation like Polygon.

I listened to Giant Bomb's podcast yesterday and they devoted a half hour to the Sim City 5 thing.

Mind you this was after the story broke that the game was basically unplayable and most of the info you all mentioned in this thread was already out.

The crtique was pretty mellow. It focused mostly on the bad communication by Maxis after the game shit itself and died and less on the fact that the game is broken beyond repair and still largely unplayable for most customers. At some point during the discussion they even discussed if the customer is to blame for that because everybody is buying shit on release day and acually expects to play it when everybody (read: every gamer nerd) knows servers will crap out at launch. They even denied that this has anything to do with EA's shitty management style ('people should get over the whole "EA is evil thing"') because in their reasoning 'this benefits nobody not even EA'.

This was the third or fourth time in a year that those guys discussed a crappy launch or EA fuckup and every time they basically sided with the developers (not the publisher) over the customers. They did it when they discussed Mass Effect 3 (even after they all had played it through). They did it with Sim City and on a few other occassions.

I like those guys and they are probably beyond reproach which makes this whole situation even more aggravating than if it only were hired mouths spouting off marketing bullshit. This is endemic in gaming journalism today.

With the whole ME3 deal people who complained about the end were 'entitled' and 'spoiled' and the whole deal was framed as an 'internet nerd fight' by 'disgruntled fans'. If EA would change the end it would be the end for authorship.

With Maxis the majority opinion by gaming journalists seems to be 'why do people expect to play on launch week, everybody knows the servers will be down'. Nobody focuses on the broken game mechanics, they all seem to expect that the servers will be fixed at some point and that this will be a great game then. As if anybody cares (except the people who spent their hard earned cash on a broken game) four weeks from now.

Nobody gave Bethesda flak because Skyrim on PS3 is so broken that they can't even release all add ons and that they can't fix it.

Nobody focuses on the culture of blatant lies and deception that seems to be endemic in the industry today. I could probably name several occasions where the PR or executive people by Bioware or Maxis have lied to the press and the customers to show their games in a better light. The whole 'let the game journos play the game on private servers before launch' thing reeks of a PR campaign that wants to sell the game as a great experience before everybody realizes the servers can't handle it.

The sites seem to be entirely sympathetic to the developers and won't even acknowledge that EA's management might have anything to do with those situations (since it mostly seem to be EA development houses and franchises that have serious problems these days). They also deny that this is basically a DRM strategy gone bad.
 
Through all this people's confidence in the quality of game releases and the quality of reporting about those releases falters. The basic recommendation even here seems to be 'everything a developer or publisher tells you about a game is bullshit and patently untrue, don't believe it' and also as corollary 'everything most game sites and game mags tell you is bullshit so don't believe them either' and as a result 'wait for at least two weeks after release to see just how much they fucked it up, better yet buy it half a year from now at reduced price'

This is toxic on so many levels that this should basically raise all the red flags everywhere, yet everybody seems to be utterly nonchalant about the whole set of issues. People have been burned so many times by so many different publishers that this has to have repercussions for future sales and it does. That so few people in the industry (either developers, publishers or journalists) seem to actually care and that there seems to be a subconscious disdain for the people buying those games is at least baffling to me.

Journalists: 'Even though we don't tell them because we're utterly dependent on the publishers' advertising money, gamers should already know that most games are buggy as hell at launch so if they are so dumb and buy them anyway then they don't deserve any better'.

Publishers: 'Let's push this game out of the door even though it's only half finished. By the time people notice we will have sold millions already and there is no lemon law that forces us to refund broken shit anyway'

Developers: 'The publishers threatened to shoot those kittens if we didn't agree to ship the game now, we didn't have any choice'

A viable business strategy this is not

The consequence for me is clear. I simply won't buy anything at release anymore. Instead I'll wait for at least a month or until it's at half price or game of the year edition with all add ons. With the overabundance of entertainment I won't even miss anything except the heartache and shit at launch. I alos recommend this strategy to everybody I know.

THis can't be in the best interest of the indutry though.

Makes me wonder how the reviewers forgot to bitch about that as well. Did they get a version with a much larger piece of land or something?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mA37cb10WMU

Since he's connecting to EA's server, I expect to see a lawsuit and arrest under the DMCA for cybercrime and hacking in the near future.

Also, several of those make sense if you look at it through the lens of EA's approach to The Sims.  Release a basic product and then an x-pac that adds features every 6 months.  Bets that one of those features will be "larger city size!" along with a "Roadways and Mass Transit!" x-pac.

Edit: Nevermind, I've linked it to someone.

Good post Jeff.

I'm not so much up in arms about the ME3 ending, considering the fact there's been tons of endings which, if you think about it, just makes you go "wha?". But if gaming journalists are actually going "everybody knows the servers will be down" and "they're all fools for actually buying the game at launch date and have the audacity of expecting the game to actually work", instead of basically kicking them in the nuts for being absolute shitheels for stuffing in shit everyone who's not a retard knows will fuck up more often than not on launch day/week, that is what worries me.

Then again, this has been a process which has been ongoing and escalating the last what, 5 years?

I began implementing the "don't buy anything at release" procedure back around 2008/9, and that's just been reinforced time and time again as a good procedure to have. It's saved me tons of money.

I agree with Jeff. I also think the day is coming when "publishers" aren't needed in the gaming industry, which will fix many of the fuckups. Developers won't be beholden to an overbearing group that has no interest other than providing an equity cut for their cash, and thus want a product as quick and dirty as possible. The publisher doesn't care if the product bombs and ruins the reputation of the developer, because it won't affect their deals with other developers.

It all comes down to financing operations. The more money that twirls around these projects, and the more we get out of hock in our own economy, the more likely you are to see traditional funders step up instead of just publishers. Right now, EA is nothing but a venture capitalist with an advertising budget for most of it's projects.

I don't have anything to add other than to say this was a great post. If only some developers and/or publishers would read it and take note.

I don't share your optimism.

Games like Sim City, Mass Effect, God of War and so on have huge development budgets. In fact they are so huge that they won't even tell you how much it cost to make one of those games.

Look at the end game credits of ME 3 for example. That's literally hundreds of people working on a product for several years. That's summer blockbuster money. I don't see how any of those games could have been or will be funded by a crowdfunding campaign so those games will always require publishers or financing and those people want to see a return on their investment.

Even an indie game on a mobile platform today most probably has a team of maybe one or two dozen people behind it, so even there you very quickly break the million dollar barrier.

The majority of the big kickstarter campaigns as far as games are concerned were never about 100% funding. They were there to collect enough funds so that they could show to an investor that there is a big enough interest in the game and find somebody who'll cough up the rest of the money. Project eternity for example was started on kickstarter to get additional funding in the range of several millon dollars by Bethesda, the company those guys work for.

Basically we're at the same stage movies were at the end of the eighties/mid nineties. The huge blockbusters of the eighties had already spawned an indie movement and people had already made a lot of independently funded smaller movies with a diffferent point of view and established an 'indie style'. Also that indie movement was already on its last legs because the funding required to even make an indie movie was breaking into seven figure budgets which brought everybody back into the studio system with all the crap it entailed.

Case in point: Wolfgang Petersen whose big break was 'Das Boot' and who went on to become a big hollywood director for a certain time once told  an interviewer that he had made 'Das Boot' for close to a million dollars and if he had to make exactly the same movie (same FX etc.) today (this was in 2009) the movie would cost more like 40 or 50 million dollars to make. The same fucking movie.

The sums of money required basically mandate investors or production companies especially since you need the budget up front to even start development on a game.

If you have time, listen one of the last few SMODcasts, the one where Kevin Smith talks to Aisha Tyler. He describes why he takes a break from filmmaking there. The gist is that he and all people involved had the most fun on small budget movies yet the budget required to even make an 'indie style' movie today is high enough that it basically makes sure that you can't escape the studio system and its influence over your effort.

I feel like this is exactly where the game industry is headed when even an old school adventure game or RPG needs to collect several million dollars to reach its funding goal.

My point is that people will see those types of games as dead money. You don't need a massive budget to make a game. In fact, so much of that cost hasn't translated at all into a viable product at the end of the day. It's become an arms race of stupidity and bad business decisions because developers don't have control of their project, control of their costs, or control of their direction many times. The costs have spiraled into the stratosphere over the last five years without any tangible advances in gaming.

I understand a publisher getting frustrated with developers not understanding how a business is supposed to look, and wasting a shitton of money. The developers need business people in the organization to understand how to cost control a project, and the publishers need to trust those people and not interfere with the timing of the project. That's the ideal work. Now in a traditional financing arrangement, you wouldn't give equity to a publisher, you'd have a 30% equity, 70% bank financed agreement. The equity money gets your startup costs, the loan money covers your costs to completion, and as long as you pay interest on the loan, the bank doesn't give a fuck when you release the game.

If these people have grown so fat that they can't even remember how to make an old school game for less than ten million then fuck em. Let them all go out of business so they can be replaced by people who aren't completely useless.

While I think the graphical polish of today's games is awesome, I've absolutely no problems with going back a few years in quality just to keep costs at a sane level. I'd much rather have a good story or great game mechanics, than great graphics with a shit story/mechanics and/or shit added to it to "protect the investment" because it's a fucktonne of money on the line.

This is why I'm backing several of the game KS projects. If Obsidian, InXile and Harebrained Schemes can pull off their respective projects, it throws a nice 'indie' wrench into the works.

Sure, you'll get the Romeros and Garriot trying to get in on the easy money and mucking things up.

But it might just be a way for small projects with a tight design and good accounting to flourish, and that's good for gamers.

Yeah but its more then enough to feel right. And yes, Tropico does support way more than just 100. Here is one example:

A Real City with 1000+ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQmhGCNR_fI)

5000 Pop Shack island (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiEQ3VmELJc)

1500? Better, and it does allow you to feel like there are tons of people there, without being that much to simulate.

Actually, who here knows of the game Sim Tower? That's the first game I know of where I could actually name some guy and see where he went, what he did, thought etc. And that was in 1994.

I played the fuck out of SimTower back in the day. It started to crawl along after 30-40 stories though, and a full 100-story tower was nigh-unplayable back then, but it did function.

There were apparently sequels by the guy who originally wrote it (the Yoot Tower series) but I never got around to trying them.

Yeah, check my edit for 5k.

Anyway, even at 100. It feels right, IMO. It feels simulated, large and gives you plenty to manage. Going to lol when they add multiplayer. As this even has combat.

I feel like Cassandra on this. The industry is fucked. It is unfuckable, to boot. There's not going to be an indie revolution to save it. There are still some awesome people out there but they can't turn the tide.

And the problem's not them (I mean, it is, but it's not), it's gamers. The new SimCity is a case study in just how broken gaming culture is. Just scads and scads of my friends are still flailing away on this game, insisting that it's great "when you can connect". Which, no, it doesn't sound like it is, but what sort of broken do you have to be to say that this thing which doesn't ever work is fine when it works? That's just the strangest thing to say.

By all rights, SimCity should be a final straw. I'm still seeing horrible nerds shelling out for it. I know a guy who works in the industry who posted on Facebooko the other day that he knew it was broken but he was going to buy it anyway because he couldn't help it. What?

So, on the one hand, the state of the industry is godawful. It's filled with crooks, shysters, and hucksters. It's become the embodiment of the sort of hype-driven, contentless capitalism which gives me hives. It's wildly unregulated, it fucks over its employees, and is just generally terrible.

On the other, I'm out of sympathy for gamers and gamer culture. They buy this shit. When it doesn't work, they get all het up in the most disingenuous manner possible, sperging all over the internet only to reboot and do it all over again the next time. They bitch about online DRM and then buy the next game with online DRM to come out.

The best possible thing to happen is for the whole thing to completely collapse. Completely. Salt the earth. It's not going to happen. A big enough collapse to purge it in that fashion doesn't exist.

I don't think they (the indie developers) need to "save" the gaming industry, at this point I'm fine with the gaming industry eating its own young for the most part. As long as the guys who are making the games I'm looking at (I've got one game I've been keeping an eye on for a short while now, I'll probably put up a thread about it soon) are able to make these games, I couldn't give less of a flying fuck what EA etc do.

I'd generally agree, but the problem is that they don't exist in a vacuum. As Jeff Kelly alluded to, what the big boys do drives up the costs for everyone. Then there's the Hollywood waiter effect I described last week: the industry generally burns people out by their 30s, they're replaced by EB managers waiting to live the dream for a third less salary, and wages are depressed across the board. Which doesn't directly affect what, say, Valve is willing to pay, but it does affect who's willing to get into it in the first place.

Maybe perversely, I'm bugged way more by all this in traditional games. MMOs seem like a different beast, to me, a more honest one. I think you'd have to be fucking bananas to make an MMO right now, but they've always been more or less honest about their monetization schemes and they're maybe the last bastion of dreamers in the industry, even if the dreams invariably fall flat. I'll take a Darkfall which I'll never play over Generic Platformer Sequel Seven any day.

This is good.  The mega-factory game producers are going have to fail before the industry moves on. Sooner the better.

The only reason I can see "what the big boys do" driving up the costs for everyone, is gamers absolutely demands awesome graphics and polish, instead of wouldn't mind it, and will never, ever back down on that demand. And I'll agree, this is a problem, but I don't see it as an industry-ending problem. There'll always be that one guy/small developer corp who just does their own thing and caters to a niche which is large enough that they can make a living off of it.

Didn't happen with Hollywood during the 20's and on when it was all about producers. I suspect it won't here.

Hollywood was never producing movies that failed to function on opening day.

wut.

I guess you mean in the literal "Is it showing on screen" way, not the "Formulaic for nearly 2 decades" way. I'm Talking about in the 20's Film, and how its made became completely producer focused, MgM, Wb, ETC.. Not much has really changed.

The other end is the "Art film house" way. Comparable to Indies now, but indies have nostalgia to lean on, instead of being an important piece of art.

The way I see it is the problem with gaming is the same problem with TV, Movies and all mass-market products.

There's always going to be enough people to shell out and shill out for the bottom of the barrel and accept garbage as great.   Gaming is mainstream culture now, this is how things are going to be until there's a crash, which isn't going to happen until there's a new content paradigm.

These "factory game producers" are the ABC, CBS and NBC of the gaming world.  They'll find revenue streams, push out the mediocre and only need to be able to capture enough to keep themselves where they are. Right on top.  

Games aren't getting cheaper even if you "go a few years back."  They're still building models on modern equipment using artists, animators, mo-cap and modelers.  They aren't just going, "Ok Ted, you're doing all this for all characters in the game."  The coder isn't wearing 4-5 hats.  We're not seeing a return to sprites.  The one man team will never create a game for mass consumption without it being a labor of love vs. a need for employment.

Go read http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/portalarium/shroud-of-the-avatar-forsaken-virtues-0/comments

As far as salted earth, meh. I still manage to find enough good games to play every year. And thanks to Steam, I'm able to check out some of these "AAA" games I might otherwise skip. In fact, I love the stupid mainstream gamer out there lapping up shit at $60 a pop. It allows me to spend $60 and buy a half dozen games on Steam.

Here's the thing though. It ain't always fucked up on release. I actually pre-ordered X-Com and played it on release day with no problems. Sure there were bugs and some design issues with the game but overall, it was a fantastic game that was worth the money. (Note, Firaxis hasn't always been clean - see the Civ 5 thread). So it isn't just a matter of release day launches being fucked because some developers/publishers can do it. It just takes more commitment than EA gives a shit to put into it because EA sucks monkey balls and drives every one of their dev houses into the ground. I'm dreading the day they finally kill DICE - they are trying very hard to do just that right now.

That is the beauty of single player games- you can pick them up whenever (and quite often at a discount).  The only games I would even dream of playing on opening day are games I plan to play multiplayer; don't want to fall behind my playmates.

Yes, because it didn't have release day problems on this magnitude because they didn't do online activation (beyond steam) or always-on crap. I do make some exceptions to that rule when I'm fairly certain it won't have drm beyond steam, but on the whole I've stopped buying games pre- or at launch now because you generally never know when a publisher wants to start using drm or makes an absolute shit game.

The absolute shit singleplayer they put into BF3 made me write off them as a company to keep an eye on. vOv

I'll just throw a spanner in the works on the "Graphics don't matter" talk here because I saw all the hatred on Oblivion for having "ugly faces." I didn't care about the faces on Oblivion, they did the job just fine and the gameplay was great. People on F13 are just as vulnerable to the "SHINEY" as anyone else. Even Me. For example, I simply couldn't play Morrowind until last year when I discovered the better graphics mods.

But the fact is that if someone brings out something unigue and fun people simply will not buy it.

Examples from my own collection? Sacrifice, Psychonaughts, Battlezone (the first game, the sequel was not good at all) Brilliant unique games every one of them that no-one bought. And then people bitch that the industry is catering to the bottom line all the time. Tabula Rasa as well, people whined that they wanted a sci fi MMO but when one comes out people bitched that it wasn't like WOW and left in droves, and on this forum for over a year talked about how crap it was on launch day and sneered because of Garriot. Well I found it one of the most fun MMOs I've played. And it was something unique, and people bitched about it for that reason.

So we are where we are because people are not willing to support good and unique with cold hard cash.

"The Sims approach" would not be shit like larger city size. The Sims approach would be <entirely new gameplay thing> and <butt ton of new buildings>. Shit like "larger city size" is usually patched in for free (they gave us the world editor for free, for example).

I didn't find the graphics in oblivion or morrowind to be terrible, particularly not to the point of morrowind being unplayable.

What's next, KOTOR's unplayable due to the graphics, too?

KOtOR's graphics hold up surprisingly well, but you can't honestly believe most people wouldn't be all BAWWWWW CARTOONY or whatever if it came out looking like that today. Because they do that. Every. Fucking. Time.


PS: Morrowind's graphics made my eyes bleed when it came out, and it has NOT aged well.

Nah, that one is unplayable because the engine is an incompatible piece of ass that's near impossible to run on modern systems. (Still hoping for a proper GoG release of KOTOR2 so I can finally play through that one)

While the game was in beta, I got shouted down in Lum's forum space for stating that despite the old SC2K or SimCity3K (IIRC) sopping up more sleepless nights than I ever spent on C&C, AoE, EQ, etc.… that peering into video demos, beta AAR, forum comments, game marketing rhetoric, etc.… , SC5 had no appeal whatsoever to me. Sure, there are some nifty elements and renovated eye candy, but it struck me as an incomplete half-baked SimTown, not SimCity. And SimTown is a wonderful conception, but not in the form of a half-baked SimCity.

But you know what. Lots of people threw their coin at EA and even with the server snafus (and ridiculousness of "always on" logging in for a single player "sandbox" game) and bug riddled state, probably enough that it will still be one of the year's top grossing games.

The difference is, Cassandra was right.  :oh_i_see:

There are enough fun games installed on my computer that I have a hard time deciding what to play every night when I sit down in front of it. I don't think the industry is nearly as awful as you seem to believe.

Yes, this is the most colossal fuckup in ages. It isn't more than that, though.

Polygon getting called out.

(http://i4.minus.com/ibmhXtGDKYQYXL.png)

I never played KOTOR in its heyday and picked it up from a Steam Sale a year ago or so. I didn't manage to get into it because the interface and initial gameplay felt really clunky and unattractive to the point that they were a detriment. I wanted to get into it, but it just wasn't that engaging at the start.

Oh no, I do expect that most people would be bitching up a right old storm about it if they were forced to play it, because they're shallow as fuck. I don't get it though, and I don't get the morrowind bitching, because from my POV it does the job well enough that I understand what's going on, and most importantly it's quick, especially on today's hardware. vOv

The biggest flaw with the game is probably the slow tutorial/opening stuff, yes. If you get through that first hour or two it really is a wonderful game.

Yes, there's plenty of scope to add in new specialisms, for example. You can make a casino town now, or an industrial town or a culture town. I can easily imagine them adding in expansion packs or DLCs for movie town (ie Hollywood) or theme park town, let's say.

Gameplay over graphics yo.

On the contrary, I think it's a telling glimpse into the psyche of the gaming community. After the dust settles, if they'll put up with this, they'll put up with just about anything. And I think, despite the wailing, they'll put up with it. Having the Thing trumps being snookered.

You say they like you're not a gamer. It's "we" and "we" are cohesive as any disparate group. "They" put up with Justin Biever and pop country. But that also allows folks like Stephane Wrembel and Sharon Jones to make a good living putting out timeless classics while the mainstream fan eats what they're forcefed by the corporations.

/throws popcorn at the KotOR people

DOWN IN FRONT!  YOU'RE BLOCKING MY VIEW THE SIMCITY CRISIS!   :why_so_serious:

Oh to be a bug on the fucking wall of the EA offices when the news was leaked that the game can in fact be played just fine without an internet connection...the tears... :awesome_for_real:

So apparently you can also destroy other players' cities:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROy6VE5ZsZw

I like park spamming better though, I wonder if it still works.

One doesn't play a Battlefield game for the single-player. You're doing it wrong.  :why_so_serious:

Apropos of nothing, today's Steam sale is Anno 2070
 :oh_i_see:

BF1942 begs to differ. But then again, that was made before publishers figured out that pants are head ornaments.

BF1942 had single player? I have literally no memory of that at all.

Wasn't battlefield 1942 single player just multiplayer but vs bots?  Or am I mistaken?

No, you're quite right, and I found that to be a much better alternative than the shit drek they shat forth in BF3.

Low tech cheaper graphics are different from ugly graphics. Graphics do matter, but it's possible to create nice graphics on a budget.


Personally I just thought Psychonaughts was dull and certainly was not unique from a gameplay perspective.

Edit: As far as buying games on release day, I do that for publishers/developers I have some faith in.  Which is generally not the publishers/developers of "AAA" titles.

In the game industry right now there is definitely a toxic stew of hype, game website writers serving as PR people (in the hope of getting jobs at gaming companies!), "day one" culture, pre-order bonuses, etc, working together to make the evaluation of products at release as misleading as possible.

BEST thing about Sim City? I got Tropico 4 for $10 and discovered a gaming genre I never knew I liked.

Same here - turns out I had a deep buried craving for a city building game I never knew existed! Can't stop playing it, and tempted to get Anno 2070 if its cheap...

Damn those island rhythms!

Tropico 4 is awesome. I do wish it had a "Visit" option, so I could have El Presidente go on some trips.  :grin:

"After" all this?

Shit, this is the industry that invented Beta-as-Marketing. Each year the major releases get progressively shorter and launch at a higher probability of negative-PR worthy issues, whether quality of executive or reaction to subjective elements. And yet the money keeys flowing.

Social and mobile games are churned out at consumable once-a-week rates. Nothing is sticky there. And the churn will possibly keep it from maturing. Which is a good thing. Because "mature" is really code for the generic business types taking over and driving decisions based on a whole bunch of goals that have nothing to do with the user.

tl;dr: These are the games we deserve  :why_so_serious:

Aw, welcome to the land of city builders, those of you who are just joining us there as a result of them all going on sale because SimCity V blows it out the ass.  :heart:


If you want to build pyramids after you're done with Tropico, I recommend Children of the Nile, it's pretty fun! And also $8 or so on Steam!

KOTOR's just unplayable due to Window's 7. Fucking thing crashes all the damn time.

I think my most  :uhrr: KOTOR moment was when I was supposed to persuade these young Selkath to go home because they were hanging around with these Sith and the Selkath thought it was dangerous for them to be there. I went in and waved my hands and said "these are not the rooms you were looking for" and they all filed out. And then Bastila bitched me out because "that's not what Jedi do!!" I was like "What the hell do you train me to do it for then?? Am I supposed to charge in guns blasting and have these teenagers cut down in the crossfire?" So I reloaded a save and did it "right." But seriously, any Jedi worth his salt would have done the same thing.

dont worry , with a little more handwaving u can tell her you're the man she's looking for.
OMG WE KISSED.
THIS IS BAD
WE SHDN'T HAVE

I lol'ed when that happened.

 :uhrr:

I just played KOTOR 1 and 2 both all the way through about a month ago on Steam, on Win7, no issues at all. Maybe Steam does something to help with it?

I don't agree.

Regardless of level (AAA <----> indie), video games are expensive and resource intensive developments. Even the two-man indie studio trying to make a game spends huge amounts of time in developing their PC / iOS title, but most of this goes unfunded at this point. Then the vast majority of these indies launch and die unnoticed. No publishers won't change the fact that trying to create a financially viable business / career in the games industry is exceptionally hard.

Publishers take on the risk of game development costs by covering them up front. The alternative is that the studio bears all the financial risk of developing a title. Given how quickly a lot of studios go with publishers, that's not a situation that many wish to be in. I also think it notable that a number of successful 'independent' game development studios have other revenue channels to keep them afloat - Valve has Steam, CD Projekt has GoG, Epic sells the Unreal Engine. They need that money to keep coming in to offset game development costs and stop one failed project being the death of the studio.

We (gamers) may be able to accept less in the way of graphics, but we want a trade-off that looks good elsewhere. Art is expensive, but so is creating a playable sandbox, or a roguelike that's fair enough to be playable, or to set up emergent gameplay situations.

Publisher mistakes are noticed because they are very public and this SimCity failure is a great example of it (plus people love putting the boot into EA). Mistakes made by indies are often not widely known or passed off as something that is forgiven because the studio was small / indie.

On top of this the price that the majority of gamers are willing to pay for their games is decreasing. F2P is very popular. iOS offer 99c titles. Steam sales mean that if we wait a bit we can get that AAA title for $10 - $15. Digital distribution means no such thing as scarcity which means gamers aren't in a rush to buy anything (until it goes on sale, which creates a scarcity situation.) So good luck if you don't have strong financial backing behind you and / or immediate success with your newly launched title - the bank is going to be less forgiving than a publisher if you are unable to fund your game development costs. The long-tail approach to business only works if you can afford to wait.

If game publishers exit the industry and aren't replaced by some other source of money (and no, it won't be Kickstarter, because it simply doesn't pay enough) then there will be a lot of flow-on effects.  And I don't think that many of them will be positive impacts in the long run. Yes, publishers make mistakes and can be (at worst) a destructive force at a studio, but I also think they've been a convenient scapegoat used by dev studios to hide their poor planning or internal problems.

If you liked Tropico 4, try to get/check out the original Tropico game if possible. It's still the city/country management but with wider range of mechanics to appease/control the population which make it even more interesting.

Maybe. I ran using my old discs, with all the eight million tweaks. Keeps crashing on the Endar Spire. My kid's the one playing it, and it apparently stopped crashing so much after. That was after all sorts of fights with Admin privileges, running in XP Sp2 comparability mode, something about Vertex Buffers, and fiddling with v-syncs and stuff. And if I play it full screen it's all streched out, but if I play it windowed the mouse disappears -- or the actual 'click' zone is like an inch below.

Lots of little things. Think I got it going okay now. Maybe Steam did fix it. Kinda thankful I have Jade Empire on Xbox Arcade -- not a lot of OS issues there.

Cogent points. I don't for a second believe it's things like Kickstarter. What I believe is that the gaming industry is accelerating beyond it's ability to measure or control costs, and many people that are involved with the actual process of making a game have fuckall for business knowledge. Put those two things together, and every developer that doesn't have a big publisher standing over it will fail. However, I believe there is a niche for business professionals who know how to make games, and a new generation of bankers who appropriately recognize the loan potential. Not necessarily CODE them, but what it takes to make them, the realistic projections, and the management of the project. Honestly, having 100% equity in a project (for anybody dev or publisher) is moronic. The next iteration is to have appropriate leverage and loaning for the billion dollar industry.

I think in many ways it will be like the real estate industry. Projects are constantly done where people get funding through equity and bank sources. The people in charge had to learn how to develop through the initial outlay of costs. There were and still have been growth and contraction phases of the business. It will have screwups, but the fact that an industry has to be entirely boom or bust is based on the mental midgets running in the trenches. It can be much better. It can be run like an actual business instead of a bunch of sweaty manchildren who didn't want to get a real job.

I'm sure it's purely a coincidence but Anno 2070 is prominently advertised on the front page of steam as part of the ubisoft steam weekend sale.

It's also fucking hard, I have never failed so often at a fucking city builder as I did in Tropico 1. But it was fun failure.

A lot of the problems seem to be caused by lack of...vision, I guess. Coherent unified vision. Decisions -- gameplay and design decisions made in isolation from each other.

Like...tossing a ton of extra ingredients into the blender without a solid plan.

Most of the ideas look good in isolation. (The rest seem to be corporate driven, like the always on internet requirement). Sure, autonomous Sims. Awesome. But nobody sat down and modeled them, apparently. No one tested them for scalability early on.

Trading between real players instead of AI cities? Awesome. But no one bothered to ask follow ups like "How do we prevent griefing" and "What if one of those guys quits?". Nobody seemed to really look at these decisions and think "How does this affect gameplay".

Autonomous sims can work. But you have to decide a scale factor, and you  have to be smart about it -- because there WILL be emergent behaviors and you want them to be 'realistic' so you have to decide when and where to override your agents. This 'nearest empty slot' instead of individual homes and jobs?

That should have screamed "unwanted emergent behavior". That's not even a crude approximation of how people work -- which means whatever actions the Sims take, it won't look a dang thing like how a city functions.

It's....I dunno. It feels like a project with so many hands, so many leads, that no one objective was seeing the big picture. Nobody was asking questions like "How will this affect gameplay? Will this improve it? What changes will the user see? Is this the sort of change the users will like?".

Certainly no one was asking those questions when it had to have become obvious there were significant changes from the core game, nor when they were having to obviously make critical decisions on gameplay as problems cropped up.

@MaxisGuillaume https://twitter.com/MaxisGuillaume/status/312355251346882561

If any loyal customers here are looking to give devs feedback on fixing the game ...

Also they are listening to your feedback unless it's offline requests =p
http://www.simcity.com/en_US/blog/article/simcity-update-8

:why_so_serious:

And, of course, the obligatory
and

If it wasn't so sad, I'd call it cute that there are so many muppets still holding up the torch, defending the lack of offline modes. :oh_i_see:

only 5 cents per post  :awesome_for_real:

Grabbed Tropico 4 from Steam for $7.50 and it certainly seems like a fun little citysim game so far. 

Another new Tropico 4 fan. What a great deal for less than $10.

I think the pen and paper industry is also instructive. Self-publishing, Kickstarter, and rethinking how rules hook into fiction have really altered the landscape. We're living in a second golden age for the hobby, with amazing stuff being put out. And it's all coupled with nobody making a living at it anymore, outside Paizo, WotC, and FFG. It's a second job for most folks, with a good selling second tier game pushing 10k copies. Compare with the 80s/90s pre-3.0 boom years, when you could get your buddies together and pay a mortgage (not get rich) on a game designer's salary.

I don't want to take that too far. There are tons and tons of differences, not least being amount of money floating around and the number of hands needed for even a small video game usually being way more than a medium sized RPG. But the way things fractured, with small studios, smaller paychecks, wearing more hats (layout, editor, designer, artist, business manager all in one) by necessity, pushing through alternate means of funding, etc is something to learn from.

Yes, try out this fix for something that should have just worked already in our $60 AAA game.

Why not run it on a virtual machine instead of emulating?  Emulation's never worked well for me, and it doesn't work at all for some of the programs I have to use to practice for ARE tests.  Virtual machines, however, have no problems.


I would posit that game studios hook-up with publishers for the same reason many professionals join a firm instead of starting their own.  You got in to the business because of your love of the product, not to deal with the business side.  Signing-on is an easy way out of all of those things you don't want to deal with even if you ignore the old Brick & Mortar channels that use to require the publisher's connections to get in to.  Distribution, revenues, marketing.   

Publishers handle the business side of things, taking care of the things the developers & content creators don't want to deal with.   This is why I've ceased to feel sympathy for the big name studios who complain after signing in these digital distro days.

I watched that video and all I could think was, if the game didn't do that in the first place, then how the hell were you supposed to design traffic routes? Unless you managed to build a layout where every single residential block was exactly  the same distance from an employment block, each with its own straight road - this is just mind boggling.

Oh, and the people at my work who are playing this claim to have had no issues at all and are worshiping it as the next coming of Robot Jesus.

My response to them is that I loved Diablo 3 at launch. Talk to me two or three weeks in.

A lot of issues being raised here are not obvious unless you look for them or attempt to micro-manage your sims. Most people are never going to track the movement of individual sims, even though the fact that each sim is supposedly an intelligent, autonomous agent is meant to be a key feature. That fact that this feature doesn't really work is hidden because most people don't care about it anyway.

Put it this way - I have been playing this game and in my city, I do not have one road clogged with traffic and another road which is empty. Instead, all the roads are used. The ones in the main residential and commercial area are busiest, and the ones on the outskirts of town, where I have factories, are less busy. You can see workers and lots and lots of delivery vans coming and going from the factories and mines. But all the roads get used, and if some are more clogged up and busy than others, it is in a way that makes sense.

Having said that, I decided yesterday to follow an individual sim. They had just come in to the city in their car - because they had been to work in a neighbouring city - and were trying to go home. They went round and round in circles, looking for a home to park in, and eventually gave up and went to a different city! Note that I hadn't recently deleted any residential zones. This isn't about having too few houses (my population has been static for a long time - the population matches the housing). This was crappy pathfindng which meant this sim was incapable of driving to its front door, or I should say, incapable of driving to any available front door.

But I would never normally have even looked at that. I have no desire to follow individual sims around. And if you don't do that,, and don't look *too* closely at what's going on, the game does appear to work.I think that what most people who play SimCity actually want from the game is to zone residential and see little shacks appear, and to know that if you give them schools, police, fire and parks without going bankrupt, those shacks eventually become skyscrapers. And that is indeed what happens.

You forgot "... and the bloodsuckers in suits who take advantage of them."  :why_so_serious:

Isn't that kind of a big red flag, too? When nobody gives a shit about one of the key features of a product?

Yes. I'm not putting the case for the defence, although I understand if it seems that way. I'm trying to explain how it can be that some people play the game and like it.

In theory, autonomous agents should deliver a better, more interesting product. (As noted upthread, it's how a lot of simulations are being done these days -- and for good reason). It's just, you know, you can't...one fifth ass it. What they've got is way less than half-assed.

Done properly, individual agents with their own houses/work places/preferred leisure activities should create organic and realistic traffic patterns, demand for schooling or better police, entertainment needs -- and move around the city. Heck, depending on how buying/selling houses really works you could probably see actual changes in property values that look a lot like 'perfect neighborhoods' (good schools, proximity to good jobs, etc) you get in the real world.

Done improperly, and well...you get something you have to paper over and looks like shit when you take a close look.

Spore -- I could forgive a lot with Spore. A lot of what they were doing was pretty damn new. There wasn't a lot of broken ground, you know? But this? SimCity's been around for decades. They know EXACTLY what customers want. And autonomous agent simulations? The ground is papered in literature about how they work, how they break, and how to -- and how not to -- do them.

I agree with your points. I think we are on the way to another industry shake-up and while it might be EA that falls, I could see another mid-tier publisher or two collapsing first. AAA game development is stupidly expensive while sales shrink leading to any single underperformance has the chance to kill a studio dead. Publishers make one or two bad calls - for THQ it was the uDraw and investing a rumoured US$50m into that Warhammer 40K MMO - and they drag everyone down with them.

Reducing game development costs are a big issue, which sees a lot of devs go down the mobile / social path. However, that means a lot of social / mobile games fighting to get noticed and little ability for individual projects to become profitable if they aren't noticed very early on after launch.

I think a lot of development wasted costs could be avoided if there was adequate planning and due diligence involved in the process.

You have a game idea and here's what it is. That's great. How do you implement it? What are the hardline goals? What are your processes? Has it been done before? Did it work? Why or why not? What's your timeline cost model? What's your six month proforma? 12 months? 2 years? What are your targets for personnel and overhead? What's your operating and management structure look like? How many current assets and employees do you have in house? What kind of personal equity do you have in the project?

If you don't have a working plan and a working model of what you want, you end up with wild promises on undeliverable features, and inevitably wasted resources.

It's not just that -- I mean, I'm used to a more agile process -- we go back and forth with customers with prototypes and design elements and get feedback as we progress. Sure we waste time, but all the actual stakeholders are involved. The only times we deliver a product 'nobody wanted' is when it's a stepping stone to something they do want, or it's an internal tool we're making available to the few who might use it (since we already had it) or in very rare, and very debated cases -- something we think they'll start using once it's there.

But in games -- you don't have customer feedback until alpha. Until then, it's all feedback either from people heavily invested in the project (the team building it) or people completely unconnected to the game (upper management who are rarely gamers, and even more rarely game in the genre of the actual product in question) which means it's really, really, really easy to lose sight of the goal.

People wanted a modernized Sim City. The autonomous agents was a great way to deepen the game without -- theoretically -- changing it. The problems started when they started adding in internet bullshit (management) and when autonomous agents weren't working properly and they hacked solutions without checking it against actual gameplay and what their customer wanted.

Not NGE levels of "ignore the fuck out of what our players wanted", more...tone deafness.

This might be an interesting read for some people? Maybe?

http://game-wisdom.com/guest/of-walkers-and-men-city-building-by-design

It's by the lead designer dude at Tilted Mill.

But then you have stuff like the new Ultima, where half the vocal minority wants a return to Ultima 7 and the other half wants open pvp original UO. It seems like a lot of projects who have listened closely to 'the customer' have been led astray by 'the rabid fringe who has time to dick around with being involved with something like this'.

People are stupid.

There's that, but...it's a City Simulator. It's not exactly some nebulous concept, some subtle interplay between various genres.

And it's not like Sim City 4 was massively different than Sim City 3 -- it was just step-wise progress. I'm sure the autonomous agents were part "better simulation" and part "more like the Sims" (even though, you  know, crossover appeal there is pretty nil) and were supposed to be progress. Except it failed utterly. And extra fail was added in. And nobody bothered to ask "Is this a better simulation of a city?"

Well, no. Not when you have to jump through hoops to play a traditionally single player game by yourself. Not when zoning has suddenly become subject to the whims of agents who don't even roughly simulate human behavior, but instead act like some sort of weird disconnected drone setup.

Other things like pretty good -- I've heard some good things about information display, about the ability to actually see and understand complex interactions more intuitively -- which is great. Simulators have tons of information you need to grasp, so the easier the better.

But they fucked up the core concept -- the simulator is busted. It's a worse simulator than what it replaced. A step backwards -- a big one.

And yet they made it just that.

64! (http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/simcity)

That's what I mean. They had an idea, but the planning was a complete mess. Granted, the publisher wanted to shoehorn in a DRM system because they don't understand the uselessness of such things in a digital world.

Perhaps an even bigger point is that the idea should have been fleshed out in the planning stage, and perhaps seen as completely unfeasible well before they dumped millions into sunk costs. If you have progressive goals and checkpoints, you can know if a project is going to hit a bailout point before it gets out of hand.

Don't you mean, Tilted Mill (http://tiltedmill.com/)?

I had forgotten about those guys. It looks like they've got a new game on the way (http://tiltedmill.com/medieval-mayor/)!

She said Tilted Mill right in the quote?  :headscratch:

I haven't looked at their older games, except sim city societies ... which wasn't exactly what I'd call great. So what's the chance Medieval Mayor'll be a dog as well?

If you didn't play Children of the Nile, you missed out (it's $8 on Steam!). SimCity Societies, I feel was generally underrated, in part because it had the name "SimCity" slapped on it and it wasn't a particularly SIMCITY game. Caesar IV was the most blah of their city-builder efforts, imo. Calling any of them a "dog," I disagree with pretty strongly, though.  :oh_i_see:

Does CotN still hold up pretty well? I missed the Tropico sale and am debating CotN for my city-builder fix.

I haven't played it in quite a while, so I don't really know! It's not like trying to go back and play, say, Pharaoh and remembering how to deal with those derpy-ass walkers or anything, though.

Love to know how Tropico4 is doing.  I'll be picking it up on Steam tonight.  All that energy to play SimCity spent on another game!

It is pretty funny seeing all the people playing Tropico 4 on my Steam friends list.  :why_so_serious:

Thanks for this. It's a very interesting piece.

It's fun. :)

I like the Modern Times upgrades so far, although they almost make the game too easy.

I haven't tried that -- still doing the original campaign. What's it add?

She did. I might have put a url tag around it.

To be honest all Simcity needs is some competition.  Well and maybe for one of their devs to post something like fuck that loser =p

If a laggy gaming experience pisses you off, then CotN doesn't seem to hold up well. I tried anything from full quality at 2560x1600 to 800x600 at the lowest quality, and moving around, twisting the view etc was at something low like 1-2fps. Fraps claimed I had well over 500 fps on the redraw, and the menus etc themselves seemed responsive enough, but moving around was just annoyingly laggy.