This live server bullshit with Simcity is ridiculous. I have had the game since Tuesday and I have been able to play it for exactly one hour. I had to try 5 different servers in order to get in and even then I couldn’t use the Tutorial (due to server issues) so I had to wing it when I could finally start a city (after three tries). Eventually I got booted.
Today I wanted to try again in the middle of the freaking day and the game is unavailable due to the servers being down. Fuck you! I spent $60 on a single player game that I have played in various incarnations for about 20 years. Thanks for ruining it.
Welcome to the world of Diablo 3! If that experience is anything to go by, you should be able to play the game you paid for within a week - not that it’s much of a consolation right now. I sympathize!
I’ve played every incarnation of SimCity on PC but I knew to wait this one out when I read that EA was going to soil the thing with always-online nonsense. Looking at the reviews it sounds like they’ve really shit the bed on this one. Hopefully they didn’t kill the brand.
I love the attempt by some douche at EA to spin this dumpster fire into a positive:
“What we saw was that players were having such a good time they didn’t want to leave the game, which kept our servers packed and made it difficult for new players to join,” he wrote.
It’s a commodity that someone has paid real money for, that they’re unable to use and have been unable to use for several days because of an easily-forseen issue that has plagued other similar commodities in the past.
What happens when EA inevitably shuts down the servers? Yes, I know it will be an older game by then, but people are still playing the earliest versions of the game. Will this cripple it? How will that affect EA’s bottom line when they sell the Sim City: Ultimate Edition to squeeze the last bit of blood from that particular stone?
They are going to have to patch this so it can be played offfline. It’s inevitable.
Not to mention the asinine requirement by EA that even people playing single-player games must be connected to the Internet at all times to play, which is a big part of the server overload issue.
What I find endlessly curious about this is that nobody else has ever made a good, generic city building game.
A few have tried; CitiesXL apparently had its good points but every version was plagued by an endless series of bugs. There used to be Caesar and Pharaoh, which were pretty neat but those are old.
No version of SimCity since the original has quite hit the mark, really. SimCity 2000 was awesome, but the economic system has huge holes in it (specifically, you couldn’t afford power plants, except to cheat and create waterfalls just to have hydro power.) SimCity 3000 was awesome in many ways but felt like they’d missed a lot of great opportunities. SimCity 4 is arguably the best but is a brutally hard game.
Now with SimCity 5 they’ve decided to make it really more a “The City of The Sims” than SimCity; the cities are really small and you’re sort of required to play the game in cooperative mode to make it work, and that’s on top of the server issues that they inexplicably failed to anticipate.
Given the immense demand for a game like this, I’m kind of stymied as to why no one’s said “I’m going to make a non-themed generic city builder and actually make sure it’s not a bug jar.”
Because as Zynga found out, EA have very aggressive lawyers who will go after anything that even sniffs of being similar to one of their IPs.
Yes, Zynga ripped off some of the Sims games wholesale, but I’ve seen on various forums/ in interviews in the past where devs trying to make city builder games have to be ever-so-careful about that stuff, simply because they can’t afford the fees to defend against the constant copyright infringement notices.
Well shit me…it says something when you can’t tell a Poe from the actions of a major publisher. Er, I mean I knew that all along! Wink wink. This ain’t a Poe though; Origin is offering no refunds.
Although I am actually coming around, the gameplay actually looks pretty damn entertaining.
If it’s satire, it’s being reported on dozens of websites and forums as though it were truth. I’ve never heard of “pr4gaming.com,” so I assumed it was real. But then, we’re apparently long past the days when satire was expected to be funny, implausible, or both.