SimCity mod demonstrates the possibility of offline play
polygon.com
polygon.com
I have several friends that picked it up on launch day and a few of them haven't even tried to play it yet. I can't understand the need to have the latest game for the compulsive gamers. To shell out money just to have it perpetuates this cycle of EA selling anything they want and the masses buying it anyway.
I went to play NHL '10 a couple weeks ago on xbox and was greeted with a nice message that the game servers are shut down. At least I can still play the game. What are the odds there will be an end-of-life patch that enables offline, single city game play when EA pulls the plugs on the SimCity servers?
In any case, it's clear that EA will laugh all the way to the bank with everyone's money. I'll keep voting with my wallet.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/gamesblog/2013/mar/11/t...
Debuted at #2 in the charts. Development time costs money, and the game doesn't need 'fixing' to sell any copies. Despite the negative press in the tech community, most gamers don't actuall care about the always online requirement. I don't see the big deal myself either - most PC games from big publishers actually install malware and rootkits onto your machine! That seems infinitely worse than always-online, but no-one cares about that either.
One that springs to mind is that everybody you burn on this one is potentially a lost customer of the next one.
Much of EA's target audience could care less about what they've done to the gaming industry. They don't give a crap about reviews or DRM or always-online gameplay. It's just how their game works.
The SimCity franchise, I'm inclined to believe, is a much smaller, geekier segment of the gaming market, and these broad strokes made from the executives at EA tend to ruffle our feathers considerably more.
I know this because i had some interaction with a company that checked to make sure retails stores were putting the games in the right shelves that the game companies had paid for.
Anyway, just as a note, this guardian article doesnt provide any data, so it could simply be a paid for placement.
I don't see any reason why we would doubt it. Sims is selling cause the real world doesn't care about internet outrage.
Don't see how glib it is to point out the truth: internet outrage isn't translating to poor sales.
If you define "most gamers" as the people that bought the products you are talking about it is certainly easier to say that those people don't care about those things.
They will take a game studio, squeeze all the juice out of it and use the profits to buy another one. Ad infinitum.
And won't think twice about buying the next one that looks appealing.
it's not that they don't care, but more like there isn't enough of an investment on their part to get worked up about it.
Just about everyone I've heard/talked to about this launch are people who care about gaming and/or game dev.
That only counts for a small fraction of the audience and customer base
By the time it was revealed to be a crappy game, inertia had carried the sales a very far distance.
I've seen this concept play out with eg NBA Live. EA produced a few decent versions of it in the early 2000's, and then produced a few really bad versions of it in a row. The first bad version sold fine, then the next releases sold less and less and the reviews were harsher and harsher.
EA had an opportunity to widen its Simcity base, that's a cost you don't see right now. More people than ever before have powerful desktop PC's. Today I can get a great PC for $600 to $800. Ten years ago, that money didn't go nearly as far (and these are less valuable dollars to boot). EA just burned a lot of casual gamers.
People rarely take the time to communicate "X is OK." That information is of no use to the person communicating. They're happy with the status quo and don't want any change. So there's little incentive to go out of your way to say that.
Often the only time people will chime in to say "I like X" is when it appears that X may be about to change.
This is a generalization, of course. People do sometimes go out of their way to give praise. This can be out of altruism ("I want others to know how awesome X is" or "I want the people who made X to get more business because they're awesome"). Others enjoy the process of critiquing. Some when confronted with negative feedback feel it's important to do justice by providing an alternate viewpoint.
The angry mob on reddit fueled by RPS and other places hungry for pageviews has literally killed the last remaining desire I had to read reddit. Some people just don't seem to be grounded in reality and act surprised about things that were known months ago.
The game is fun, it's broken in spots and the launch was poorly done but I'm hopeful they'll fix it. You are 100% right about people ranting about it yet still buying it but we have to keep in mind that even "communities" as big as reddit are only a fraction of the people who actually buy games.
This seems to imply that Rock Paper Shotgun is printing sensationalized fluff. I don't think that's a fair characterization at all. As gaming news sites go, I'd say Rock Paper Shotgun is generally pretty thoughtful and reasonable, and thus it's built up a lot of credibility with a lot of people. Is it really being "hungry for pageviews" to report that important statements made about a game's underlying technology are patently false? Because to me that just sounds like good journalism — the kind that the gaming industry could use more of.
“It’s not like each Sim has a specific job that’s his, and a specific house that’s his,” says lead designer Stone Librande, like this knowledge might mitigate the situation. Instead, each Sim that will inhabit your thriving metropolis (or crime-ridden housing project, as the case may be) will wake up each morning and start the day by looking for a new job – if they’re not sick, that is, in which case they’ll look for a hospital. And every evening, that same Sim will leave work and take a moment to look for a new place to live. Filling out employment applications and being interviewed by already-unbearable roommates every single day. Oh, the humanity!
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/03/28/first-look-simcit...
Then when they realize how much everyone hates the game they talk about how the simulation was nothing like they were promised.
These are reports, of course, and we’re not experts when it comes to AI. But what we’re seeing people say is rather than each Sim having a unique life, they’re instead operating on the same sort of systems that control the sewage and traffic. Which seems rude. It also explains why there appear to be lots of rather odd behaviours found in the game, with distribution of jobs, buses, and the like feeling a touch odd.
...
But where it gets even weirder is when their work day is through. They don’t trundle off back to their well-loved home, as you might imagine a Sim would do. They, just as with work, move into the nearest available house. There’s no consistency to their lives, no permanence.
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/03/13/simcitys-sims-don...
some people just see what they want to see, though, I suppose.
Why not? They won't play the game they already bought because they heard some bad things about it?
As long as quarterly projections are met, who cares if there's a mob with torches outside.
And this is how game makers and publishers have managed to get away not only with astoundingly bad DRM but also in releasing quite broken and incomplete games in some cases. It's because gamers continue to let them get away with it.
In offline mode, since it doesn't save my city... maybe it'll offer a different way of playing. Sort of like old school games that didn't have any save points :)
Interesting! So you're saying the lack of fixing problems appears to be a nice cover for a the lack of an interesting game?
The budget controls don't go as deep as SimCity3000/4. In the past I could shave a couple dollars of the road budget, but that would result in pot holes and less repairs. Can't do that now.
The cities are also very small. I'm waiting for EA to release some "awesome" DLC that gives you a decent sized city. The more I play this game the more I like SC4.
That was also my impression. I think that, more than anything else, is the reason why deep gameplay has a hard time developing. Ironically, I also have a hunch they did it in order to prevent overload issues. Which they're currently experiencing regardless of the limit.
I only played SC2k, but even back then I wished you could have much larger cities - which is why the "more than one city on the map" feature intrigued me. But seeing how limited that is and how limited the cities themselves are... Quite a shame.
I suppose you could call it compartmentalization[0].
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compartmentalization_(psycholog...
Cities XL is another game between Sim City 4 and SimCity where the land your city is build on will not have all of the resources your town needs, forcing you to juggle two or more towns. Some locations in that game are only good for resorts, some are only good for oil, etc.
http://answers.ea.com/t5/Miscellaneous-Issues/bd-p/sim-city-...
The only reason it shows up here on HN is because there are a lot of interesting technical flaws which we enjoy analyzing. Things such as scalability issues, backend architecture, DRM, leaked client-side code, etc.
Even if they enabled an offline mode I still wouldn't be playing it. Course that's all subjective so I guess there will be those who disagree. I think most of the yelling and screaming for an offline mode is the gaming community making a Custers' Last Stand on the issue. People are mostly upset about the concept of not "owning" the game and that at some point in the future they might not be able to play this game. I doubt very many of those upset would actually want to play this game in 10 years time. Course I do agree with the fundamentals of that argument, but unfortunately I don't think we'll win.
Guess what I'm trying to get at, is the passion surrounding this game is more due to principles than enjoyment or zealous fandom of the game itself. Well perhaps some of the outrage is over how EA has destroyed a classic series like SimCity. But that doesn't mean the game is good and you should buy it for the playing experience.
I've played the previous sim city games, but I never really liked them. Looking at the videos of the new one, it seems like they made it a bit more accessible, such as not requiring players to build power lines or water pipes. It's more of a game that I would play casually for half an hour here and there and still find it fun.
The certificate is hard-coded in the binary, most certainly.
Also, TPB has trusted uploaders, so you can be reasonably sure you aren't installing malware. I'd wager many of the cracking groups have a higher reputation than EA.
If you will install a crack, you will install a crack, no questions there. But if don't hard-code a CA then people who might otherwise be hesitant to pirate because it involves a crack program would be perfectly happy to follow a couple steps they find in a blog post.
they are already nearly indistinguishable from malware.
your average anti-virus program will flag a cracked executable every time, and you can routinely spot the less savvy users by viewing any torrent comment section and looking for "AVG FLAG AS TROJAN DO NOT DOWNLOAD"
Seeing how much effort EA have put into preventing piracy of this game (to the extent that it hurts their paying customers a great deal), I would be very surprised if they made so silly a mistake.
Of course none of that is impossible to break, and there is a point of diminishing returns (when it's easier to try to change the certificate loading code).
I quick github search returned:
Still, it's a useful mod for people who have unstable connections. You can also mod the UI to link a rarely button used button to "Sync", so that you save at will.
It doesn't totally fix the traffic pathfinding problems though.
1. http://www.reddit.com/r/SimCity/comments/1a9n5j/you_can_edit...
2. http://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1a9t0e/simcity_modder...
EA just don't get it so I will help them a bit by choosing to spend my money elsewhere.
Civ V wasn't great, either, but Civ V:G+K turned it into a decent and worthy successor. Maybe the same thing will happen with SimCity 5.
How is it that every single thing in this game is broken? I tried playing multiplayer as well once I got bored playing alone and got just as bored except faster because I was still playing singleplayer because nobody will ever join.