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Comment by tinfoilman | Hacker News Reader

EA, desperately trying to force life in to a product they did not understand and now attempting to recover the large part of their fan base they alienated.

Not going in to the rant, there were many around the time this PoS hit the market. All I can say is, as an avid sim city player, Sim city 4 had it. This new thing called Sim City, was more a city based sims level. I was just waiting for the "sim City delux edition where you could get +5 more houses, and some new cars"

Honestly I used to love sim City, but after spending £50 on sim city, it really is (and i said this before sim city) the last EA game i buy.

Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me

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fool me consistently for a decade or two... why aren't more people boycotting EA yet?

Because many of the games they publish are quite good? Just in games that are current, AC4: Black Flag and BF4.

AC is a Ubisoft product and BF4 has been so screwed up that investors are exhibiting enough concerns that the team for BF has moved from working on ANY dlc, to fixing the immediate issues that BF4 shipped with. Not to mention they trashed the most recent C&C because it was terrible.

I know that I pre-ordered BF4 and have yet to play more than a couple of hours since launch. How much have things improved since then? Has the CPU parking issue been fixed? It's silly that I have to run some third-party CPU utility to make the game playable.

I haven't heard of any CPU-related issues, but the current patches are sort of in a "two steps forward, one step back" tango. Some major thing would get fixed that breaks a myriad of smaller things, which would get fixed in the next patch that would then break some other minor things...

It's also taken a frustratingly long time to patch major game-breaking issues - the main one I kept running into was getting the "accept revive yes/no?" prompt when you die, which you can then not get out of short of quitting the game entirely.

They also managed to break SLI support completely during a recent patch. Like, completely. SLI users would have their screens turn into a flashing disco-tron.

Client crashes are still an issue, but a lot less common than before. Server crashes are likewise still an issue, but a lot less common than before. The general stability of Battlelog seems improved also - right now the general crashi-ness situation resembles what the game should have looked like at launch.

As a Texan, I can tell you that "two steps forward, one step back" is a two-step, not a tango :)

Been quite active in BF4 since liking BF3 enough to update. Only a handful of crashes, most of which during apeshit insane scenarios. Resource usage by the engine feels far more efficient than say, GTA4. My moderate laptop with dedicated graphics card can handle the game swimmingly at medium-low settings.

No third party "helper" apps or non-standard or beta drivers, and a few background applications running clogging up some potential memory resources wanted by the game.

Oh, right, my bad on AC. Well, replace that with Deadspace then. That franchise has captured a lot of minds, but I don't know about the quality of 3 (1 and 2 were good).

And FIFA.

I think that despite its well publicized problems, there are some really great things about the latest version of SimCity.

The user interface and graphics and music are just fantastic.

The concept and execution of using roads instead of tiles is a huge improvement.

But the limit on the city size is very frustrating.

I would trade a lot of the new bells and whistles (well the fancy graphics, but not the nice UI) just to be able to build a gargantuan megalopolis, even if it didn't run very fast.

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