Sim City 4, 2000, and the original still run perfect and are extremely fun to play. Sim City 4 is on Steam even making it easy to get right now. I'm tempted to pick that up since I have not played it. I loved the original and 2000 though.
In another discussion on hn, someone was basically saying "no one acts so surprised when you can't access Facebook if your internet connection is down, why are they so ticked off here?" I'd argue that it's because most people have a reasonable expectation that a locally-installed, single-player game should work regardless of connectivity.
There may be potentially valid technical reasons why SimCity might need or even want a persistent connection, but you absolutely need to call that out.
With EA's record of shutting down still-active servers for the multi-player portions of games that were just a few years old, I would be very reticent to buy an EA product that required a server even for single-player mode.
1) release it as sim city online, with marketing emphasizing it's like a sim city mmo. People will be more tolerant of launch network issues. Make lots of $$$
2) later release single player sim city 5 (just rip out online parts from above) make more $$$
Such an inept company.
The ugly truth remains the same: this game is "social" just as an excuse to implement hardcore DRM. Sugar-coating.
You can do things like: - volunteer excess services such as fire trucks, police cars, trash pickup, recycling trucks. The last one there can be lucrative if you use the raw materials you collect to build processors. - buy water/power/etc utility capacity on an as-needed basis. Instead of having a brownout if your city grows but you forgot to scale up your electricity production, it'll just buy some automatically from other cities in the region - town hall upgrade modules, such as the "department of transportation" which allows more transit options (train/ferry), "department of education" that allows colleges and universities, etc are shared with the region. Each time you level up your city hall you are allowed to add one of the department modules. Eventually you get to a point where you need over 290k citizens, but want some of the upgrades from a department you haven't built yet. A neighboring city can build those departments to help you out. - After spending a bunch of money on university research and applying for a great works project, cities can contribute the resources needed to build these large scale products, and all the cities in the region benefit. Great works projects are things like a major airport, a huge solar collector (the size of a city), a space program, etc. Some bring tourists, some provide resources, etc.
The game is extremely social, but if you'd like you can ignore it. I'm in agreement with everyone here that if you want to ignore the social and play offline, you should be able to.
The game was never meant to be a sequel. That's why it's calls SimCity and not SimCity 5. People just decide to interpret it as such even if its not.
Does not compute.
SimCity's been a single-player offline experience since its inception. It's reasonable to believe in a vacuum that a newly-released "SimCity" game will be the same.
Lots of people are in such a vacuum -- a LOT of people hear "A new SimCity game is coming out / has come out" in their periphery and, having enjoyed its past iterations, rush to buy the new copy. Their surprise in finding that it's an entirely online experience is reasonable here.
Calling it "SimCity Online" could have dampened this effect, causing some -- if not a lot -- of people to stop and think "Wait, what makes it Online? Oh, it's more like an MMO."
You play your game, and if you want to do something social and the servers are down -- it sucks, but you can still play, and take part in the social stuff when it is up and working.
For online saves -- there is a local backup for when the online system is down.
These are not difficult things. They are just trying to fight an ever-losing battle against piracy.
SimCity games were always able to hit the casual gamer, you never needed a hardcore gaming PC to play. Why SimCity 5 needs things processed server side is just for the sake of bullshit DRM.
The only way for EA to recover from this will be to release it DRM free (or at most with the serial key DRM of days gone), otherwise SimCity 5 won't even be remembered beyond the news articles of 2013. As an avid SimCity player I can recall every game, I'll never recall SimCity 5 as at this point I'll never get to play it.
Likewise :)
Played all the Sim City games all the way back to Sim City Classic (though I played it on SNES). Played the rest on PC and also rebought Sim City 2k on gog.com a while ago for nostalgia. Even my brothers, who I would only consider casual gamers were always able to play them without a problem.
I'll never touch Sim City 5 though unless it comes to Steam and without the always online DRM.
doesn't Steam also have DRM?
It is DRM, but I don't find it to be onerous.
Individual publishers may add additional DRM measures, at their option. Those can sometimes be painful, but are clearly stated on the steam store page for each piece of software.
I'm always paranoid and check both the Big Steam DRM List[1] and also the Steam Forums to make sure there isn't any additional DRM not listed. Especially since refunds are hard to deal with on Steam.
[1] http://steamdrm.flibitijibibo.com/index.php?page=DRM_Lists/T...