The way I see it there are two extremely large hurdles to overcome. I’m going to lump together some overlapping genres to make my point.
1. Graphics and interface. I’ve tried very hard to get into LinCity-NG, OpenTTD, and Freeciv. Their stock graphics packages are not even comparable to the artwork included in the commercial games that they clone. They make it much more difficult to get immersed in the game.
Now obviously, objectively speaking, SC and SC2K have worse graphics than LinCity-NG, but those were still immensely enthralling games at the time. But we’ve been exposed to so much better since then. Often games with shitty graphics just can’t hold my interest when I could be playing a current-generation game instead. Gameplay itself may wax and wane across releases but that’s the way it is - once you have played, e.g., SC4, SC2K and OpenTTD will have an uphill battle keeping your interest, or that of any average gamer.
The interface for those clones is also stuck in the 1990s, a la the old shovelware Xyz Tycoon games. That’s a problem in a department overlapping with graphics.
2. City simulation is computationally challenging. SC4 was a beastly package back when it was first released, and running large cities on it is often tediously slow. It’s still known as a way to turn your computer into a radiator (although part of this has to do with inability to take advantage of multi-core processors).
I can’t speak to the simulation on SimCity 5 because I haven’t played it, but from what I have read, they’ve traded off large city size in order to more realistically model more variables.
The next-biggest hurdle is probably that there just isn’t that big of a market for simulation games. There’s only room for the one AAA franchise. And then there’s not much incentive for people to buy any lesser competitor (like Cities XL) when SC4, the current gold-standard, is over a decade old and on sale for $10 in bargain bins across the country.
Right. At this point, the main comedy to be gleaned from satire is laughing at people who fell for it, regardless of how much the satirical piece sounded like a real news story or that person’s honest opinion.
On the plus side, The New York Times and the BBC are now occasionally publishing satire in a completely deadpan, plausible, and, therefore, hilarious fashion.
Thinking about this a little more–even beyond the question of what happens when EA decides to pull the plug is what happens when some of the people stop playing? For example, the typical MMO launch has the first couple of days with overloaded servers, then the company opens a bunch of new ones to spread people out, then a bunch of people quit after a couple months and half the servers are ghost towns leading to server consolidations and such.
If I’m following the threads and other game play descriptions correctly, the towns here are smaller and more specialized so that everyone is pretty dependent on others in the cluster. But of the, what, 16 or so plots in Cecilville, I bet that even if EA gets the servers to run perfectly as of tomorrow, in 3-6 months half of them go away just from normal gaming attrition. So what happens when the guy who decided to make his fortune in regional trash collecting has enough? Where does the casino-city guy send his crap?
I have stopped buying new video games. I sensed quality slipping away from the formula and more “stuff” being packed in. The stuff ended up being mostly: graphical capabilities and complexity.
However, a dazzling and complex piece of shit is still a piece of shit. I can play a game from back in the 90’s and have fun, even though the game is simpler and less sparkly. The difference being, the end product had to be playable and enjoyable, otherwise it wouldn’t sell.
Now games can sell and be broken and not fun. See what happened to the Civilization series. See what happened to the SimCity series. See what they did to the Resident Evil series.
All I want is a game I can play and enjoy. And when 15 year old kids with zero money and free software can design playable and fun games that you can also get for free, and companies with huge staff, millionaire CEOs, and insane experience and capabilities turn out steaming piles of monkey crap, I officially resigned from being a customer of the commercial video gaming marketplace.
I am still playing my old games, and still having fun. It saddens me to watch companies like Nintendo and EA who used to be the generators of great games completely go off the rails. But my loyalty has always been to a good game, not a name brand I respect stamped on a piece of shit.
The essence of fun of any Simcity is the god like power a player has over his own little personal world, multiplayer interaction is absurd anyway, requiring it is moronic regardless of connection issues.
This really seems like a fundamental DRM issue the developers wanted to build into the ‘game experience’.
Stealing stuff from Reddit. From Reddit!! So, its come to this, has it? At long last, its come to this. We shall try to remember you as you were, once upon a time…
Ive had a beef with EA since they bought and shelved a COMPLETED game i was looking forward to, literally weeks from its release date, years ago… for them to do something stupid now doesnt surprise me at all.
D3 hasn’t been patched like that AFAIK, what did happen is that there’s similar games out there which actually happen to be playable offline. I’d hug my copy of T2 but it was a download…
i have given up on EA ever since they pulled the third instalment of Mass Effect from Steam. i love SimCity but know nothing about this latest one. Blizzard justified its actions because D3 is about loot, and they want all loot to be tradeable on its $$ auction house. what’s the justification for SimCity?
I’ve been throwing my hope (and money) behind projects launched on Kickstarter, so small- and mid-size game companies can get money to fund their project early in the development cycle and not have to rely on some giant faceless company like EA to offer them enough money to get by then force all kinds of changes and DRM and other crap on them. (Notable hopes right now - Torment: Tides of Numenera by inXile, a “spiritual successor” to Planescape: Torment, and Project Eternity by Obsidian Entertainment.)
Thanks for this. I am severely pissed off about what EA has done with the SimCity franchise. I guess I’ll give Tropico a try, because there’s no way in hell I’m giving any money to EA. I don’t care how good the game supposedly is; I’m not paying for something that can be yanked away from me at any time if the company decides that maintaining the servers isn’t profitable anymore or whatever.
I would recommend Dark Souls to you if you are of preternaturally calm disposition and entirely immune to fits of controller-hurling rage. Otherwise, no.
My guess is that he’s talking about Ultima 8: The Lost Vale. It was an add-on (stand alone?) to Pagan.
EA canned the game after it went gold but before it was released… and then promptly threw everything in the trash without archiving anything so there’s nothing left of the game., unless one of the developers had a spare copy sitting around.
Their reasoniong was that they figured they’d hav the same market pentration as previous expansion poacks, and Pagan was so bad that they basically didn’t sell jack squat. And it was so bad because the game was horrendously rushed out the door on EA’s orders… when then also happened to Ultima 9.
Are you sure it wasn’t the sequel to Leather Goddesses of Phobos? Man, I HATED the catacombs, and I always used the cheat code to get through that bit. And yes, I played and replayed the game in every permutation, male and female, tame, suggestive, and lewd modes.