Which reduces the chances of the game surviving for the long term. Sure, they can put in microtransactions and paid expansions to generate revenue to keep servers running, but how long are they going to do that as opposed to coming out with SimCity 6, where they promise all the people who gave up on or didn’t buy 5 that they fixed all the problems?
5 years? I think that’s highly unlikely. As I recall, they shut down the servers for many of their 2010 sports games in 2011–that may well be a closer timeframe.
Basically, I just wish that people would stop excusing ****** “service” on the grounds that “well, the game is really good!” So what? You’re never going to get a game that isn’t full of these craptacular events unless you STOP preordering stuff and STOP buying games that are behaving like this. Otherwise, you’re basically just telling EA “No no, it’s fine. If the servers melt down and I can’t play my game, I’ll give you my money anyway, I’ll just whine about it on the internet” as if EA cares about you whining on the internet.
Now that I finally could play for more than a few minutes, I am finding the game interesting and fun. I think the problem I was having with the play style was equating a particular Site with the cities I built in earlier versions of the game but the closer approximation is the Region is what I used to call a city and the Sites are parts of the gigantic city. Sure they are spread out but basically the game is designed that you can’t have everything in a single site so you basically have to build pieces in multiple sites and connect them. In that way it also reminds me a little of the Sims 2 where the sites are households and you would jump from household to household and play.
It is different and I think I would prefer the old way but now that I understand this I think I can enjoy the game more.
I don’t think anyone is dismissing the fact that this launch was an utter failure. Heck, online only games from much smaller developers/publishers, don’t have this kinds of issues, certainly not past day 1. A lot of people are angry, and a lot of review sites have lowered the score on the game drastically (gamestop gave it a 5, Polygon, originally a 9.5, and now it’s down to a 4).
But it’s the nature of the beast. If EA could not create a service out of this game there would be NO SimCity, period. Or at least not with he kind of budget this one got.
Unfortunately, I’m convinced that exclusive AAA games on PC are dead without a “service”, always online component. Thank you pirates.
I don’t know much about servers and such but some of you do.
I understand that it doesn’t make sense to buy enough servers to handle the early phase rush because then you’d have serious overcapacity. Within the first few days, you might have 1 000 000 people trying to play the game at the same time yet for the vast majority of its lifecycle, you might get 10 000 at a time. I get that.
Yet, isn’t it possible to rent servers to handle the early rush? Buy an option on more server rentals in case your owned servers and rented servers have difficulty handling the early phase rush?
Is there something which makes this impossible, difficult, quite prohibitive?
I played for 5 hours last night without a single server issue. So IMO it was a horribly botched launch, which is pretty inexcusable - but that’s not going to stop me from playing what is a pretty fun and engrossing game. I probably have the advantage of never having played a SimCity since 2000.
In the large corporate world there are solutions for temporary lease agreements for virtual servers where you can scale up rapidly and then back out rapidly so you don’t spend a huge amount of upfront capital for capacity you never use, but still have rapid expansion capability. But that’s often for really generic situations I think, I’m not sure how or if there is any such ability for game servers or even what kind of hardware / OS would make up the game servers that run a game like this.
I really loved the SimCity franchise up through I believe Sim City 4; all the reviews on Societies made me think it wasn’t the city builder I remembered so I never purchased it. I’ve always loved sandbox style sim games, dating back to the early 90s/late 80s when some of these games first came out, and it’s always been a genre without a lot of fans and limited game releases.
I don’t have an immediate objection to the always-on stuff, I understand why it is there and while I played the heck out of SimCity 2000 and 3000, I wasn’t playing them 10 years later. This isn’t akin to an EA sports title, I suspect the servers will be around a lot longer than most people play the game.
What turns me off the most is from what I’m hearing it’s like Sim City 4 in that to make a “huge” city you have to think in terms of all the cities in a large region, but unlike Sim City 4 you can’t even get a self-functioning city running in one fo the city tiles. You basically have to build at the regional level from the early game, and then they emphasize having different players control each city in a region. Sandbox games aren’t something I want to do multiplayer, personally.
Plus, from what I’m hearing an entire region in the current Sim City is dramatically smaller than one in Sim City 4, and the individual cities are much smaller than the “large city” sized individual cities in Sim City 4.
One good thing to come from all of this is I did find an article that listed some alternative city builders, some of which sound really interesting: link
It doesn’t really matter; They obviously didn’t write their own OS for this, so the rest is just software and (potentially virtual) hardware. Since the servers are probably identical barring some identification, there’s really no reason they shouldn’t have been able to use this sort of technology for this. And if they couldn’t, that’s their own bad planning.
That’s what I’ve heard, but I got the impression from some reviews it’s a bit of a clunky solution. To get the full effects in Sim City 4 you had to build regionally, but it was nice that you could build a self contained city to start with so you didn’t have to think regionally from the ground up.
You know what pisses me off? This would actually be a great SimCity game if:
-it worked
-the city size was 4 times the size (like a large city in SimCity 4)
-The cities in the region were closer together
-I could terra-form and create my own cities/regions
-It included highways, elevated highways, subways and farmland like in the past three versions of SimCity
Yep, it’s different. Some old things aren’t there anymore. But there are A LOT of new things. In general, it is a much deeper game (though, not without bugs, but neither were the others.)
Alright, that may be worth my interest then. Like I said I’m not too keen on this multiplayer business (I play multiplayer games, just feels ‘weird’ for a series I typically play as a sandbox time waster.) From some things I’d read on other forums you basically had to be dependent on your neighbors to do anything.
I’m not totally opposed to the multiplayer concept, I think it’s neat in some ways, I’d just hate to build a city and then one of my neighbors neglects his for a few weeks and my city goes to hell because I was dependent on him for stuff I can’t setup for myself.
Cities can share services, which is quite beneficial for a newly established city to sponge off an well set up existing one in the same cluster, but it’s not required. And there is a sandbox mode.
What I hear from people who play, however, is that there’s no reason it couldn’t have those new things. They didn’t have to make those contradictory choices; they opted to because it fit with their goals for the future: a game that couldn’t be pirated and for which they can milk an endless series of microtransactions indefinitely.
Customer service, or even making the game fun, is always a secondary issue for EA. They want you to buy the game; whether you can enjoy it or even play it is only important insofar as it prevents them from selling you the next product.