EA finally “exploring the possibility” of offline mode for SimCity | Hacker News Reader

EA finally “exploring the possibility” of offline mode for SimCity

arstechnica.com

37 pointsdanso49 comments

EA lost me as a customer because they treated us as a hostile agent that was somehow infecting their project goals.

The condescending attitude toward what we all knew was one thing. Refusing refunds was another. But when EA started to threaten banning customers from their Origin accounts (an EA only app store in which customers may have made multiple purchases) that was it for me.

EA took what was once a source of immense enjoyment and nostalgic memories and twisted it into one of the few battles I went nuts over.

It will be a long, LONG time before I consider purchasing another EA game (despite my addiction to sports games on the consoles).

EA does not hold a monopoly on sports titles, although they have the license to use NFL teams.

But 2K Sports also has a license for NBA teams, in NBA 2k14 for instance. And I actually do like the Nintendo-based sports games a lot. :-p

I'm crossing my fingers that 2K gets back into the thick of things in the nextgen with the NHL series, which is where I used to spend the majority of my down time :)

The ability to play offline is far down the list of improvements they could make to this game. For a start, the inability to create any meaningful regions means players just end up building a few specialised 'neighbourhoods' separated by a couple of miles of grass or forest. The highways and railways only seem to link up 4 neighbourhoods at a time so your 'Metropolis' ends up being more like 4 seperate, non-connected towns, each consisting of 4 little neighbourhoods.

EA massively missed the goal posts on SC5. Players enjoyed crafting a whole world of their own, micromanaging it down to the nth degree. I didn't spend hours and hours playing SC1,2000,3 & 4 thinking "if only my city could be smaller and it was compulsory to play with strangers who don't share my design ideas".

The only thing they got right, in my opinion, was the graphic refresh and bendy-roads.

I did buy the game when it came out, even had to buy the Windows 8 upgrade pack to play it! I don't know what I was more disappointed with, SC5 or Windows 8. I can't remember to be honest because, after 1 week of playing the game, I booted back into Linux and haven't restarted since.

What Windows 8 has to do with SimCity?

I didn't fancy running it on clunky Vista and my copy of Windows 7 was still the Beta version, so not legal anymore. I actually thought I'd go and buy Windows 7 but no.... you can't buy Windows 7 anymore, so I had to settle for 8!

As stated, I use Linux day-to-day.

In a way, everything.

Both are prime examples of corporate desires to push something new on the customer, despite the harbingers of doom that preceded their launch.

Coincidentally, both seem to also be scaling back some of these "mandatory" decisions because the market has rejected them on a massive scale.

The way handled this game is really quite sad. I was excited for it, the previews looked promising ... but the fact that the server performance was newsworthy, and the small-city problem, meant that I never bothered buying it. I imagine I'm not alone.

Not having actually bought the game I can't say for sure, but I wonder if the much-touted online features haven't been as popular as they hoped ... which means that this now 7-month old game is probably quite expensive for them to keep running into perpetuity. Ripping the online features out, and allowing offline only, could allow them to save on running costs?

I'm in the same boat as you. I was anticipating this game but after all of the issues, I never even thought twice about passing on it.

I have absolutely nothing to back this up, but I feel that the vast majority of gamers that would be interested in this game probably didn't have the slightest clue about any issues the game has had. I read tech sites regularly and as such I, like you, chose not to buy it, but it wouldn't surprise me if sales were to still be fairly good. The problems were newsworthy, but in the UK I only noticed a few articles stating the issues, and compared to other games the news seemed fairly tame when you look at the severity of the issues. It wouldn't surprise me if this news was largely ignored by those that found out through mainstream news sites.

The thought of being happy about a games failure feels quite bad, considering those that worked on it are real people who would probably like some successful projects under their belt, but in a way I'd be quite happy to see that EA had suffered because of this release.

I'm in the UK too, and I believe it was frontpage BBC news for a fair while. Also, don't underestimate the network effect of twitter & facebook for the non-tech crowd ... if people see their friends moaning about their woes I would suggest it is likely to make them think twice. How many people were making positive comments about sim city during it's launch period?

As both non-owners, you both dont know that features were disabled in SS for literally months for some users. The entire launch and release was a fiasco.

They're "exploring the possibility" and I'm sitting here at my PC, playing SimCity in offline mode thanks to the cracker that made it possible.

It's not very PC to call them that.

Cracker, as in someone that "cracked" the DRM (which was done a while ago I believe).

Cracker usually entails "black hat". It would be proper to call him a "cracker" if he broke the DRM and distributed it on Bittorrent.

Although if you crack the DRM, and then distribute it as a patch-file that modifies an already installed version of Sim City, that would be a "Hacker".

Methinks he's using the term correctly. I'm just musing because it seems like a lot of people here are not accustomed to underground lingo.

That's racist. How do you know he's white?

"Exploring the possibility" is more about deciding how to spin the fiasco to show that they intended to offer an offline play option from day one and it was all a big misunderstanding on the customers' part. You see, they'll have to show that the initial problems with the servers was because the online option was so popular and so heavily desired by customers that they had to focus on that before offering the option that hardly anyone really wanted in the first place.

There already is a half working offline mode server emulator (made by one person). And EA has a "Team" working on exploring the idea of possibility of having an offline mode.

Give them credit. Marketing teams don't generally know how to code. They're probably still learning...

Explore away, EA. Right while I explore the possibility of buying something other than your game.

How long are people even going to care about them bungling things like this? Admittedly, I'm not a super hardcore gamer, but as indie games and iOS games achieve ever higher levels of polish and depth, I find it hard to lament any one company's flops - there's too much good stuff out there to enjoy in just about every genre.

Actually, in terms of PC gaming, flops can be more devastating simply because of the quality options available that don't treat customers as hostile parties. It just depends on whether the game is flop because it isn't good or because the game would be good if not for the publisher's incompetence and/or stupid decisions.

But then again, many of the big publishers tend to write off PC gaming every few years as a lost cause until they "discover" this wonderful new source of revenue. This usually happens during the lead-up to a new console generation release. But then it doesn't always work out for them at first because the core audience has long memories. Plus these days, as you say, there are other, and often better, options out there.

I, for one, am still hesitant to buy anything from Ubisoft because of their incredibly stupid online DRM fiasco. Yes, I know they've moved beyond that era of hating their customers for buying their products more than the people who steal it. I don't care, I still hesitate.

Just a second. EA is one of the big publishers when it comes to the Windows platform. Meaning they have quite a few franchises that have followers. However they have been vilipending their paying customers as potential thieves for a very long time with quite a few blow back and under delivering compared to the customer's expectation. So, sure you can enjoy 'indie' games on other platform, but as publisher go, I would advise to look and think twice before you buy any games from EA.

On the technical side, I am far from surprised at the BS official answer from EA regarding the feasibility of offline mode, and bigger playground.

I can see my phrasing was a bit imprecise - when I said "How long will people even care?", I meant how long will people bother protesting when they can just buy good, fully functioning games from other publishers? For me, EA just seems to be among the most boring, mediocre and un-user-friendly forces in gaming. With the wealth of great games out there, I wonder if they'll see a Zynga/Nintendo style reversal of fortunes in the near term.

I'm sure they'll look into it after they fox all the glaring simulation issues graphical glitches and severe city size limitations. The bigger problem, and I realized this after just a couple days of playing is that the game just isn't fun like the previous ones were.

Being sick in a tiny city, yet completely overwhelming every public transport option with teens of thousands of people hanging out at single bus stops, with no ability to build a subway is a huge simulation failure.

So many game regressions replaced with dumber alternatives. I ended up uninstalling it after a couple weeks and loading up sc4k instead.

I completely agree (see my comment along similar lines).

The online/offline debate has diverted far too much attention away from other, more important aspects of the game (at least to players) that badly missed the mark. I'm certain SC5 would have been slated as "the disappointment of the decade" even if 'online-only-gate' had not happened.

Didn't they say that it was a technical impossibility for SimCity to be able to be run offline?

Is it possible that EA is finally (belatedly) learning to listen to their customers? Could this be the point that they turn around as a company and become player centric?

Or am I naive and reading way too much into this?

They probably want to fire 80% of staff working on the servers.

Right. EA has determined

1. No way to milk this year-by-year (John Madden's SimCity 2014...)

2. So, might as well see if there's a long tail.

My wife bought this game, and was really mad at how EA bungled it. It's probably the last SimCity game she'll buy. So from this single data point, yeah, EA might as well give up :-/

Let's not pretend that the reason EA made this game online online wasn't primarily an anti-piracy strategy.

The reason they may be considering an official offline mode now is that a) it's been cracked anyway and b ) the majority of game sales happen in the first few months.

They did install a new CEO recently.

Maybe he's the one leading the new EA.

I do remember everyone being confused when EA did the humble bundle where proceeds went to charity.

http://www.ea.com/news/humble-origin-bundle-results

To me, its like the new Pope. Things might seem like they are going the right direction, but it might all be a part of a long con.

This will be a fascinating study as to how companies can (not) win back the trust of their customer base.

What online mode? SimCity, SimCity 2000, SimCity 3000, and SimCity 4 all still work offline.

Oh, they mean SimCity Online! Why would they want to remove online mode from SimCity Online? Surely they didn't bill it as a single player game that needed an online component!/s

When they announced a new SimCity game there was no mention of it being SimCity online - that was only announced later.

Sure, you can say that people shouldn't get excited about a game until they have something more solid than initial announcements and rumours but if companies want to benefit from the pre-release anticipation, they need to make sure they don't mismanage that expectation.

Exactly. If they had named it "SimCity Online" then a great deal of the negativity attached to it likely wouldn't have happened.

EA on not allowing larger cities: "The system performance challenges we encountered would mean that the vast majority of our players wouldn’t be able to load, much less play with bigger cities."

Seriously? If they had allowed offline play in the first place, the city size would only be limited by the player's own hardware.

Isn't all this moot if the RCI is just faked? The glassbox is not an engine at all. Nothing you do in game actually effects the economy or labor force directly.

How is offline mode going to change the fact that the game is not a simulator but a really pretty linear RPG.

>> Isn't all this moot if the RCI is just faked? What!? Is this true? I've avoided this sequel (to one of my favorite games of all time) because of all the other user-hostile moves made, but I'd not heard anything about this. If that's true, there's nothing left of the spirit of the game. Why would anyone play this game, ever?

First off, I don't own the game. Having an interest in the series I did a good deal of research to decide over whether to buy it or not. I avoided it big time from the beginning based on the comments from people playing it pre-launch and post-launch.

I don't know the current state of things but all indications were that the simulation was severely broken. I'm not sure about being "faked", as in intentional, but things just worked in ways that made no sense.

For example, one experiment involved a city that was all residential with no services whatsoever. Low taxes kept population in positive for happiness so people kept moving in to replace the people that left because conditions were so miserable.

The theory is that you could succeed at building a decent size city no matter how badly you managed it.

It's true. After just a couple plays I figured out the simulation and could basically do whatever I wanted and make loads is cash and everybody was happy. It was like playing a crappy sc clone on good mode.

Too little too late?

Then perhaps I'll "explore the possibility" of buying it. But probably not, they have left a nasty aftertaste with their shenanigans.

The pirates beat them to it.

unfortunately it's not the possibility they are exploring, it's the users...

What, you mean the same offline mode that people hacked into it shortly after it was launched? To say it would take significant engineering work, when people have already done it fairly quickly, just makes you look like an incompetent liar.

To be fair to them they have to support the thing - a crack may be good enough to get someone up and playing but from their perspective they need to make sure it's rock solid else they'll face a repeat of the backlash they had when the online version was flaky.

No matter how well they want to make it, it wouldn't take six months of development with full access to the source code though.

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