SimCity is back, gaming is dead, RIP gaming.

[luckton]

/throws popcorn at the KotOR people

DOWN IN FRONT!  YOU'RE BLOCKING MY VIEW THE SIMCITY CRISIS!   

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...

[jakonovski]

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.

[HaemishM]

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

One doesn't play a Battlefield game for the single-player. You're doing it wrong. 

[Simond]

Apropos of nothing, today's Steam sale is Anno 2070
 

[tgr]

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

One doesn't play a Battlefield game for the single-player. You're doing it wrong. 

BF1942 begs to differ. But then again, that was made before publishers figured out that pants are head ornaments.

[Ingmar]

BF1942 had single player? I have literally no memory of that at all.

[Malakili]

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

One doesn't play a Battlefield game for the single-player. You're doing it wrong. 

BF1942 begs to differ. But then again, that was made before publishers figured out that pants are head ornaments.

Wasn't battlefield 1942 single player just multiplayer but vs bots?  Or am I mistaken?

[tgr]

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.

[Margalis]

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."

Low tech cheaper graphics are different from ugly graphics. Graphics do matter, but it's possible to create nice graphics on a budget.

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.

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.

[Lakov_Sanite]

BEST thing about Sim City? I got Tropico 4 for $10 and discovered a gaming genre I never knew I liked.

[Maledict]

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!

[Mrbloodworth]

Tropico 4 is awesome. I do wish it had a "Visit" option, so I could have El Presidente go on some trips. 

[Venkman]

Yes, this is the most colossal fuckup in ages. It isn't more than that, though.

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.

"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 

[Sjofn]

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.  


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!

[Morat20]

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.

KOTOR's just unplayable due to Window's 7. Fucking thing crashes all the damn time.

[Sir T]

I think my most   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.

[rk47]

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.

[koro]

 

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?

[UnSub]

I also think the day is coming when "publishers" aren't needed in the gaming industry, which will fix many of the fuckups.

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.

[tmp]

BEST thing about Sim City? I got Tropico 4 for $10 and discovered a gaming genre I never knew I liked.

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.

[Morat20]

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?

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.

[Paelos]

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.

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.

[Outlawedprod]

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...

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.

[Sjofn]

BEST thing about Sim City? I got Tropico 4 for $10 and discovered a gaming genre I never knew I liked.

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.

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.

[Morat20]

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.

[Outlawedprod]

@MaxisGuillaume https://twitter.com/MaxisGuillaume/status/312355251346882561

I’ve been playing with new congestion avoidance tuning in @simcity today, what do you guys think? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVkw9mWonNA

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

I encourage you to go to the Test server so that we can expedite the timeframe in which this feature is brought back to the rest of our servers.

[tgr]

And yes still no mention of offline mode, thanks for not listening to us

This is just update 7 reposted, I guess a glitch?

That's because Sims Update 7 was the first available link when your mouse agent walked by.

And, of course, the obligatory

Just accept that it's not happening. The point has been made, time to let it go.

and

Shut up about the offline mode allready

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.

[rk47]

only 5 cents per post 

[Quinton]

Grabbed Tropico 4 from Steam for $7.50 and it certainly seems like a fun little citysim game so far. 

[Numtini]

Another new Tropico 4 fan. What a great deal for less than $10.

[Modern Angel]

I think in many ways it will be like the real estate industry.

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.

[Fabricated]

@MaxisGuillaume https://twitter.com/MaxisGuillaume/status/312355251346882561

I’ve been playing with new congestion avoidance tuning in @simcity today, what do you guys think? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVkw9mWonNA

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

I encourage you to go to the Test server so that we can expedite the timeframe in which this feature is brought back to the rest of our servers.

Yes, try out this fix for something that should have just worked already in our $60 AAA game.

[Merusk]

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.

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.

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.

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.

[Bunk]

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.

[palmer_eldritch]

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.