The SimCity Debacle – 5 Ways SimCity Shows Everything Thats Wrong With Modern Gaming

"Encouraging people to work together is laudable, but sometimes I want to live or die based on my own choices. I want to take responsibility for my own (cities) fate. If I can do that while playing without being online or waiting in a queue too, all the better.", Says CalmDownTom

[DarkFireHawk]

I agree. I really hate what EA is doing to the industry.

[Yi-Long]

... EA once again didn't listen to what many of us already feared, and those fears now became true.

Putting an 'always online' demand on a game that many of us have enjoyed and WANT to enjoy as a Single-player game and OFFLINE, has very much ruined the game, at least this first week, for many.

Our 2nd fear and 3rd fear, namely micro-transactions and too small cities, have already been mentioned as well in both feedback as well as (not too admiring) reviews.

After the great Sim City 4, this seems to be the 2nd time EA has screwed up with the Sim City license (the first one being Sim City Societies), not counting the Facebook game.

Such a shame :( I still love Sim City 4 so I guess I'll stick with that.

[tachy0n]

just find the crack and crack the game, since you bought the game there is no problem with cracking it....

off to the piratebay you should go and download the crack.

ITS NOT PIRACY SINCE YOU PAID FOR THE DAM GAME!!!

ALL HAIL THE ALMIGHTY PIRATEBAY!!!

[Blacktric]

"5 Ways SimCity Shows Everything Thats Wrong With Modern Gaming"

-Always online DRM
-Dumbed down gameplay
-Marketing overhype months before release
-Delivering a half assed product on launch day that's beyond redeeming
-Treating customers like sh*t after they ask for a refund and threatening them with the possibility of getting their accounts banned

From the top of my head.

And then they went full on damage control mode and published the half assed video below.

http://www.youtube.com/watc...

And the sad thing is, this crap will keep happening over and over for a very long time, thanks to kiddies that keep buying the crap that EA produces. It happened with Dragon Age 2, Dead Space 3 and many other games before. And it will keep happening.

[amiga-man]

Totally agree if gamers put up with crap they shouldn't be surprised to be treated as such, M$ charging for online access is just more of the same until people demand better things will only get worse

[ThreshStar]

I completely agree with the "Social" aspect.

As much as I like the idea of building a city with someone, online gaming has taught me one thing: Gamers truly are a pile of garbage.

Yes, there are good, respectable, honest, and cooperative gamers out there that want to get together to have a good time. However I find myself running into a LOT of selfish, greedy, disregarding players.

If you want "Always online / Social / Cooperative" games to take over the market, Publishers & Developers need to do two things:

1.) Help the gaming community because a respectable place with decent human beings

2.) Stop treating us like we're drooling idiots. We're not. Hopefully.

[kevnb]

wouldnt be such a huge deal if they just had enough servers... And this article is making way too many assumptions for me to take seriously.

[Bordel_1900]

I was going to buy Sim City, then I read a review that stated that they had lots of problems during the review. The game kicked them out and they lost hours of play, they couldn't log back on again etc.

I didn't buy it and I'm glad I didn't.

[jmac53]

I hope Microsoft is watching this if they are considering an always online console. They would be in for a world of hurt if you couldn't even turn your console on because of Xbox live server issues.

[jmc8888]

The EA guy is a moron from that article.

He stated that that's why they have a bigger region.

Did the douche ever play the earlier games? Maybe there are some regions with more cities capable, but from what I saw a 'region' only had THREE cities. Perhaps again, there are some with 5 or 6, but even in the region with THREE cities, there could have been more but they chose not to have cities next to each other but far away from each other.

In Sim City 4 there was literally 20-30 cities, maybe more, capable of being built in a region.

The cities are literally 15-20x smaller than the large maps of Sim City 4.

If they were so concerned with the performance, then they should have ALLOWED people to CHOOSE what size they had, like they did in Sim City 4. That region I talked about, had different sized lots to build a city.

Either way it should be an option, especially to those with decent computers to be able to build bigger cities. Even if they had it tied to the overall level of power of the system, like a system check, which could be then disregarded if desired, that would set the maximum size of the city, is literally something that takes 10 seconds to think up like I just did.

Farcebook is on the way down, I don't know why people keep clinging to it like a nasty dingleberry.

EA assumes far too much. It assumes we'll take this crap. It assumes it knows what we want, and then completely botches it up.

We were concerned about performance, so we limit what you can do. Don't they think THAT would be a bigger and more REAL concern? Of course not, they think they know all and can do what they please and get away with it.

They knew there would be problems, why else even code a queue in for a single player game.

[PotatoClock]

"If they were so concerned with the performance, then they should have ALLOWED people to CHOOSE what size they had, like they did in Sim City 4."

I really don't understand why they didn't make that an option, unless bigger city areas are gonna be part of a DLC later on.

I remember getting SC4 and my PC struggling with it, but as the years went by and I got back into SC4 later on I could do so much more with a newer PC.

I don't understand this short-sighted vision EA have, unless of course it is just so they can bring it out DLC's or maybe release a new version every year.

Money seems to be much more important than quality of a release these days.

[imtheman2013]

If they fix the server problems and expand the map sizes, I'll probably buy it sometime down the road. I really wanted this game to be great... too bad.