SimCity, One Month Out: Still As Troubled As Day One?

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Soma42

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Plenty of single player games like Fallout, Bioshock Infinite, Skyrim, The Witcher, FTL, etc. all are incredibly successful.

If you make a quality product and make it easily accessible (i.e. limited DRM) to people, they will pay for it.
 

tridon

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It's good to see that more people agree that this feels like a beta, not a release worthy product. It's sad that this game we've waited on since 2005-ish is so lackluster :(

I preordered Cities in Motion 2 (a €20 Paradox-title) and on releaseday it was excellent, though with a few minor, non-critical bugs. A team of 11 made a game that for my taste beat the crap out of the beta that SimCity in truth is. Maxis has shown through the years that they are able to make great stuff, so I guess I'm still waiting for a number of "huge patches". Still hoping it will become the perfect, aweinspiring citybuilder of epic proportions that I imagined when I heard about it one year ago. Doubts are growing however. *sad face*
 

Shankovich

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I'm really annoyed with the hardware optimization the most. Crappy frame rates, artifacts at certain zoom levels, and a really slow chat system...the game could have used another 4-6 months in the oven.
 

amoralman

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Best. Article. Ever.

/rant
I can't stress enough how EA, fake DLC, always-online is killing the industry, ruining franchises. I can't wait for the day games are given back to gamers, and the aggressive capitalism gets the fuck out of the gaming business.
/end rant
 

kinggremlin

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I supported EA through the initial servers access issues that only lasted a few days. That wasn't a big deal to me, nor is the always online requirement. But, the more I played the game the more my support has eroded to the point that this was the first game I ever stopped playing because of bugs and instability. This game is such a disaster at the base levels that I am shocked that EA even chose to release this game when it was released. I am baffled how the Q/A testers ever signed off on this piece of junk or if there actually are any internal testers at all. Within an hour of the 2.0 patch release there were numerous users complaining of crippling bugs (horrific pollution from nothing). How did the testers miss these? I hope this game gets fixed and runs the way most of us wanted it to, but I have no faith that that is going to be any time soon. I will never preorder another game from EA.
 
Someone should make a movie about the modern gaming industry. They could show the dramatic effect publishers have on games and how companies like EA can continue to lie about a product to sell it and not get fined.
 

dragonsqrrl

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I've gotten pretty far into Sim City, and the only advice I can give prospective buyers is to avoid this game for as long as possible. If you've been seriously considering it, just don't. At the very least wait a while, it's not ready for prime time. A lot of the mechanics in the game are either broken or make absolutely no sense. Here are just a few of the problems I encounter on a regular basis, some of which were also mentioned by Joe.

Traffic at intersections with stop lights is absolutely terrible, to the point where it simply doesn't work. Users have had to invent creative solutions in street layout to either minimize or avoid the use of stoplights altogether, which is ridiculous. Once you reach a certain population this can completely kill your city.

Path finding in the game is stupid, which further contributes to the traffic problem. Vehicles seem to take the shortest path (in terms of distance to destination) no matter what, even if there's a colossal traffic jam in the way and there are many other open routes available. Since practically everything in the game is dependent on this system (cars, public transit, trash, fire, ambulances, tourism, etc)... ya, things don't work so well.

Public services seem to randomly stop working, more specifically trash and recycling pickup.

Rail cars don't work, even on a simple loop, they're simply broken. But at least Maxis has acknowledged this one.

Oh ya, you can lose a city or even an entire region due to some sort of critical (and seemingly prevalent) server syncing bug. Yes, you could lose all your progress with no chance for recovery. Why? How? No one seems to know. It's the "City unable to process" error, and there's a 220+ page forum filled with users who have encountered this problem. Unfortunately I'm one of them. Luckily my city was able to recover after about a week of inaccessibility.
http://answers.ea.com/t5/Miscellaneous-Issues/Info-request-Cannot-process-this-city-at-this-time/td-p/731232/highlight/false

Tourism is broken, largely due to traffic problems. Tourists won't visit your city if you have heavy traffic around tourist destinations. So ya, path finding again. Also, tourist numbers seem to drop off a cliff and never recover for no apparent reason, even in the absence of heavy traffic. Maxis has supposedly addressed this specific problem in their latest 2.0 patch, but I haven't noticed a difference.

Intercity play, the core gameplay mechanic in Sim City, needs some serious tweaking. Lets just call this broken for now too. The idea is that you can share resources between cities so you don't necessarily need duplicate services in a region that can take a significant toll on your city budget, such as a university. The thing is at a certain point it seems like every city needs a copy of every service in order to progress, and certain services don't seem to contribute to the region in the way they're supposed to... such as universities. Also, money transfers between cities can take a ridiculously long time to go through. I waited almost a week once before another city in my region received a transfer I made.

Overall Sim City has been a bit of a disappointment, as you might imagine. There are tons of other critical, practically game breaking bugs out there, but I'm tired of typing. It's just sad because this game really seems like it has the potential to be great. For the first couple hours the experience is honestly fantastic. There's nothing like building up a city and watching it work. But then it breaks, and the reality of the broken features and mechanics sets in. There's no better way to sum up Sim City, the more you play the more frustrated you become.
 
Well I would agree with everything said in this post with the exception of Origin itself is not really bad. I have not had any problems with Origin in any of the games I have got from EA.

As for always online games I will never buy any of them that includes Diablo III and SimCity. Both I had been looking forward to for quite some time but just like Blizzard and Diablo III EA has killed SimCity franchise. If they ever pull there head out of there ass and release a offline patch I will buy but not until then. And of course EA has said they can't do that because the game was built with always on DRM from the beginning and would require a complete re write of the game engine which most games know buy now is a bucket full of lie!
 

bee144

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Spent $85 on this crapware of a game. Never. Buying. Another. EA. Game. (That includes BF4, I spent 300 hours on BF3)

As the article pointed out, the game is boring and severely limited by map size. The game is single core only, which is why the maps are so small. These past two months they've managed to do nothing with the game.
 

ojas

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Yeah it was messy. RPS ran a few articles on this too, latest being on the silence from EA:
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/04/22/the-power-of-silence-why-the-simcity-story-went-away/

Even the Age of Empires 2 HD launch has been very messy. Never got media attention though.

p.s. Joe, the new comments section under the news items is pretty bad...forums are fine, imo, though quoting is buggy.
 

kettu

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Blatant pro-consumer bias! Very well done.

bee144, I think what EA is counting on with their DLC and micro-transactions that Pishgar mentioned in his article is that people like you who have allready spent quite a lot of money will invest a few dollars more to get the content that in the past would have automatically been included in the retail price. It's like they're manipulating their customer base: "Have you invested $60+ for our incomplete game? Good! Pay us $10 more so you can enjoy it with full content or watch your initial investement circle down the drain"

One way for us to put the screws on publishers is to stop pre-ordering games. After the latest Aliens game debacle and now this... I'm definately waiting for credible reviewers and internet forums to chime in before I part with my money. Pre-order bonuses be damned!
 

azxcvbnm321

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More DLCs and micro-transactions are the least of SimCity's problems. If only the game were good enough for someone to want to buy more stuff! The fact is that the core mechanics are screwed up and so no amount of pretty, shiny new buildings or content will make the game better.

However this will be an interesting test to see what happens with a terrible game that you know has many DLCs scheduled down the pipeline. How will EA price the DLCs? Will they even release them? Right now, it's almost a sure thing that these DLCs will lose money, very very few people who have the game will spend one more penny on it. If I were EA, I'd probably give up and scrap whatever DLCs are being worked on right now other than the ones that are required to be released due to contracts with advertisers.
 

Super_Nova

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I totally agree with the writer. And they (by which I mean big compagnies like EA) say that software piracy is theft. €59 for something (even) less entertaining as watching my cat vomit on the carpet. If I possibly want another game from EA in the future I'll torrent it first and then decide if I'll buy it or simply delete it and save some precious hd. space. Stuff like this seems to be structural (allthough EA is not alone in this) and not an isolated incident. EA worst compagny in the US? Think again since they sell their failware all around the world.

On another topic: I liked the review. How about a section called Tom's gaming and review games (in conjuncture with h/w, or something like that?)
 

DavidRappl

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I pick my preorders very carefully. I preorder games from Codemasters f.e., but not from EA. And I was right, there were some big problems at lunch date. Some weeks ago, I thought, EA has fixed all the big bugs, and I bought it. What a huge mistake - even long after the lunch date:

1. Server crashed multiple times: I build city for about 4 hours, then the server crashed. I load the city again, and there is just nothing - all gone. So, I start again, spend about 8 hours in building a city. While building it, the server crashes. I load my city again, hoping not everything is lost, and there is my old city I build in the first place. What the hell? I work as a software tester including server load testing, and Sim City is the most unstable game I have ever played.

2. Huge server lag: The server lag is just ridiculous. If you are building a big project, you have to send resources. Some resources arrive up 12h late or never arrive at all.

And what the hell is the deal about Origin? On the PC it works - more or less. But on my Xbox, it is a total disaster. Can not connect to server, after two weeks online gaming I have to enter another serial number (because I EA thinks I never entered one), takes more than 2 minutes to connect, and with Fifa I can not play online over Origin at all.

I really hope that DICE is able to let their developers make a great BF4, and that EA does not insist in implementing a stupid microtransaction > You are out of amo? How about 1.99 USD for a full magazine?
 

thrakazog

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LOL.......so, some people were linking this article on the simcity forums, and EA moderators were blocking the posts claiming it was a link to some guy's hardware store named Tom......no joke......and that the link to the this article was just some store trying to sell stuff.
 

thrakazog

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.......oh, and that TOM ( who wrote the article =P ) was just using EA bashing because it was a good way to get hits for his stores website........ROFL.......
 
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