SimCity is back, gaming is dead, RIP gaming.

[Paelos]

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.

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.

[luckton]

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

[KallDrexx]

This video is a better example of why it's retarded.

[jakonovski]

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

[Morat20]

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?

[luckton]

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

[jakonovski]

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.

[Morat20]

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. :)

[kildorn]

  Still interested in first hand Anno 2070 impressions though.

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.

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.

[Paelos]

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?

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.

[jakonovski]

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?

[kildorn]

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.

[Miasma]

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

"An online interconnected world has been part of our design philosophy since day one," she said. "It's the game that we've been wanting to create since SimCity 4 as we've wanted to explore the dynamics between cities as they exist within regions. Real cities don't exist in bubbles; they specialize and trade resources, workers and more.

"With the way that the game works, we offload a significant amount of the calculations to our servers so that the computations are off the local PCs and are moved into the cloud. It wouldn't be possible to make the game offline without a significant amount of engineering work by our team."

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.

[Simond]

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.

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!

[Miasma]

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.

[Sir T]

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

[Venkman]

That's the "no refunds" part 

[jakonovski]

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.

[Morat20]

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.

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. :)

[palmer_eldritch]

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.

[Sir T]

Well, somewhere has to be Japan on their servers. 

[Morat20]

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".

[Rendakor]

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.

[Phred]

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.

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.

[Teugeus]

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

[luckton]

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:

So you want to grief a public region, or maybe your friends? Well, just claim a city, or more, take out all bonds and spend it all on roads. The game will now go to pause because you don't have any money, and as you have no buildings, you have nothing to turn off, no income, only expenses for the bonds, and because the game is automatically paused, you can't receive any gifts from your neighbours.

Abandoning the city doesn't reset the economy in any way, so all you're left with is an unplayable area in the region. Do this to a lot of citys in the region, and you've successfully ruined the game for everybody.

 

[Kageru]

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.

[Sheepherder]

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.

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

[jakonovski]

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.

[Khaldun]

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!

[waffel]

[Lakov_Sanite]

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!

5/5 - Would read again.

[Merusk]

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.

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.

[Khaldun]

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.

[Sir T]

Either that, or for copying the plot of Robocop 2