EA's SimCity Disaster Made Worse With Early Positive Reviews

Gaming journalists missed an opportunity early this week when positive reviews trickled in before the actual SimCity servers even launched. The discrepancy between pre-launch and post-launch review scores is enormous. The average score before launch was 9.3 while the average post-launch score was only 7.3 out of 10.

[MooseWI]

So it's a good game, but the server issues that are repaired/going to be repaired dragged it down.

[Yi-Long]

... you still have a city-builder game that you can't play offline, that has too small cities compared to Sim City 4, and that will milk it's consumers through DLC.

I'm sure it's a nice game, but is it really an improvement over Sim City 4. when you look at these negatives? Personally, I doubt it.

[grailly]

it's a GREAT game, I played the whole day yesterday and I can say that the smaller cities really aren't that much of a problem, they just force you to be more efficient rather than spreading your city out to get more population.
It's a different kind of challenge from simcity4, but I really like having to rebuild parts of my city while trying to not disrupt it's functioning.

On top of that, the game nails all the charts, part , which is also really fun. I do think it's a better game than simcity 4.

[pixelsword]

It may be a good game, but if the server issues are prevalent, why weren't they obvious before launch? Were the numbers too low to show problems or did they honestly review the game?

[brish]

"if the server issues are prevalent, why weren't they obvious before launch?"

Some types of server issues only appear under heavy load. When reviewers played the game their weren't many players so they wouldn't have ran into the problems that users faced after the game was released.

[Soldierone]

When reviewers get the game, they get it a week or more before launch. At that time there are maybe a few hundred people playing, not thousands.

I've had an instance where the games multiplayer was fantastic up until launch, then the game struggled.

[MooseWI]

They were on private servers too

[porkChop]

Early reviews were done at a 2 day review session running on a private EA network. That's why many sites chose to wait until the game went live to review it under consumer circumstances. Many sites also felt that 2 days is not nearly enough time to properly review a game.

[pixelsword]

Aha! Two days? For SimCity?

Not nearly enough time: they could have also waited to observe the load.

[SDF Repellent]

I will just stick with my SNES version of Sim City for now until a more ethical version of the game gets made.

[titans9999]

Fuck Sim City, I will wait for the newly announced Civitas where the creators are letting the fans control how they want it made, including mods!

[ACEMANWISE]

I think the review system needs an overhaul. It hasn't changed much since online started. They need to consider that games change in realtime through updates. They should review each version of a game to give gamers an accurate picture of how a game evolves.