Taking SimCity Offline Took Over Six Months

[exfileme]

A lot of code was rewritten to get that game playable offline.

Taking SimCity Offline Took Over Six Months : Read more

 

[skit75]

Hopefully, other developers and publishers are watching.

 

[Jerky_san]

Wouldn't of took 6 months after the original release day if they'd of simply listened to the community and did it in the first place.. CitiesXL failed online as well.. Course its engine sucked as well which made it where you couldn't get past a certain pop cap but thats a different story..

 

[Murissokah]

I like how developers talk about their "vision" for online gaming as if it had nothing to do with trying to force everyone to depend on their online services.

 

[Stimpack]

Wow, they must be REALLY good to do the impossible!

 

[ddpruitt]

the team had to rewrite the entire system -- which was written in Java

Be afraid, be very afraid....

 

[Grzegorz Wereszko]

It is funny, for one part, some hacker was able to activate a switch and make the game fully offline. Only issue was that the game didn't save or something like that.To me this is just a bit of, "yeah we messed up, so lets make up some excuse why it took long to activate an option so people can play offline"

 

[bemused_fred]

Wow, they must be REALLY good to do the impossible!

You. I like you.

 

[dusty13]

the team had to rewrite the entire system -- which was written in Java

Be afraid, be very afraid....

my thought exactly

 

[fleeb]

It is funny, for one part, some hacker was able to activate a switch and make the game fully offline. Only issue was that the game didn't save or something like that.To me this is just a bit of, "yeah we messed up, so lets make up some excuse why it took long to activate an option so people can play offline"

Yes, because it should only take a day or two to do this:

"Our game routes pieces of data from one city to another as data flows through the regions," he writes. "All of that code exists on the server, and now we've brought all of that down into the client. The client processes the region box, which is what all of the cities pushes their data into. We've brought that down into the client as well."

 

[razor512]

If it really took that much work, then how did the cracking groups make a cracked version of the game with offline play after just a few days of the games release?

 

[Avus]

Too late, I don't play this sh**ty game anymore... Another sh**ty EA game i also stopped playing is BF4....

 

[glasssplinter]

I'm not a developer or programmer but seeing the amount of talent that goes into a game like this (regardless of bugs) tells me that something as simple as fetching data from surrounding regions online could easily be routed to the local game. Surely Simon doesn't expect us to blindly believe that they started working on the fix "soon after." If they listened to the fans in the first place this would have never been included!

 

[qlum]

and yet it took (probably a single cracker) less time then that to take the game offline. I really think its a matter of only putting one or two guys on it and not wanting to emulate the server that took them so long.

 

[capt_taco]

Wow, talk about too little, too late. It's too bad publishers of series like SimCity and Diablo can put out a crap game and still make a profit off of name recognition alone. Which sucks for all the people who were excited for a real SimCity game, not crappy SimCity Social.

 

[Ragnar-Kon]

Great news, but unfortunately this won't change much for me. The online-only aspect was annoying, yes, but wasn't a deal killer for me.The tiny city squares, however, are a deal killer. And I probably won't get back into SimCity until that issue is fixed.

 

[vmem]

Good job, us gamers have to feed the EA team for 6 months while they work on something that would've came with the base game. I feel SOOOO much better now about what EA is doing :sarcasm:

 

[rantoc]

Yeah right!! I bet the line below took them 6 months if you type about two letters per month!#define OfflineMode 1And done if it was coded properly from the start...

 

[oxiide]

Great news, but unfortunately this won't change much for me. The online-only aspect was annoying, yes, but wasn't a deal killer for me.The tiny city squares, however, are a deal killer. And I probably won't get back into SimCity until that issue is fixed.

The other half of the offline announcement was that this will open up the game to modding support. City size has been a huge complaint with the game, so I imagine that'll be one of the first and most obvious things to mod into the game if it proves possible.

I have a wait-and-see attitude, but I may actually give the game a try. Voting with our feet is powerful, and when a developer reverses a bad decision they should be rewarded. That sends an important message, I think.

Good job, us gamers have to feed the EA team for 6 months while they work on something that would've came with the base game. I feel SOOOO much better now about what EA is doing :sarcasm:

EA has always maintained it was Maxis that was so committed to the online-only requirement. Maxis' statements seem to back that up, or at least not disprove it.

 

[Darkerson]

* cough * BULLSHIT * cough *

 

[Cons29]

if they are gunning for another year of worst company in the world, i think they are in the right path

 

[jaguarskx]

Hopefully this is a lesson learned for EA.

1. Loss of potential revenue from players who did not want an online version of a classic game.

2. Lower bottom line revenues because EA needs to pay the salaries for the individuals who were working to reverse engineer the game.

In the end, SimCity cost EA a decent amount of money because of #1 and #2. Let's not forget the damage to their reputation (or should I say FURTHER DAMAGE) which can have longer term affects...

 

[dark19991]

I wonder why dont they make a single player mode addin, then improve it instead of spending time rewrite code. Single player mode which seperated from the core online gameplay should be nice. Lift all the restriction online mode has.

 

[tobalaz]

Too little too late.
You ruined a classic game EA, RUINED it.
For God's sake Sim City 4 and Sim City 2000 were MUCH better games that were complete on launch and didn't have stacks of paid DLC to make the game half functional.

 

[agnickolov]

@dark19991: If you read carefully, and if you understand software engineering, you'd realize they have done exactly what you are suggesting.