""... could we have built a subset offline mode? Yes," Bradshaw states in no uncertain terms. "But we rejected that idea because it didn't fit with our vision.""
If that's your vision, you need some new glasses. Putting to one side every single other problem with the Online system (technical issues and game restrictions (and that's a big thing to ignore)) and taking her words at face value (which I don't. I think she's lying through her teeth.), I love how she talks about always online as supporting some kind of bold, new option. When it's really forcing multiplayer into a game genre that is well-known for being more fun in single-player. Cities XL tried this, and it failed. Your "vision" indicates a willingness to simply take control away from players and say, "No. This is the game now. I know you didn't want it to be this way, and I couldn't care less."
""loving the Always-Connected functionality"" - although "lack of functionality" is more accurate, I hate this. I hate the idea that for a game's multiplayer mode to be fun, there must be no single-player. It's illogical. It's basically saying, "We wanted to focus on a new, multiplayer orientated game for SimCity. To that end, there is no single-player mode at all. And yet, we're still charging a preposterous £45 for this, with no discernible reason beyond naked, short-sighted greed."
Imagine this thinking in a different industry - "Green cars are, we think, the future. We really want to support green as the primary car colour. To support this goal, we refuse to sell any other car colours. It's green or nothing."
"We think that pizza is the future of the restaurant business. We really want to support pizza as the primary food served in all restaurants. To support this goal, from now on we will only be serving pizza in all of our restaurants. It's pizza or nothing."
I see no reason, literally none (from a game design perspective), that these supposedly-epic multiplayer features could not have been optional. If you build a good MP, people will play it. That's no justification for removing single-player. Her carefully-worded PR speak uses words like "focus", when the correct term would have been "focused on to the exclusion of all other possibilities."
We talk about "artistic vision" and how fans have no right whatsoever to shape a game series, but reality of the situation is this - Maxis made SimCity an MMO, and was then surprised when fans of a traditionally single-player franchise were annoyed at waiting 10 years for a new SimCity, only to get an MMO.
The response to this, of course is, "Well, if you don't want SimCity the MMO, don't get it. Buy another city-builder." This would be basically fair, if the modern city-builder market wasn't made up of;
Tropico. Fun and pleasing, but a much smaller scale than actual "city" management. The bigger towns never get past a few thousand people maximum.
Anno. I've never played this, but it's apparently a bit wonky, and suffers a bit from the Tropico problem of not really being a "city" management game. Plus, if you don't want a Tropical/Medieval/Futuristic aesthetic? You just want present-day, vaguely realistic-looking cities? Then you have...
Cities XL. The only fair competition to SimCity as a modern, pretty "true" city builder. Rather flat mechanics aside, the game's virtually unplayable. By the time your city is nearing 1 million population, the game has serious, crippling performance issues. It doesn't matter what your rig is at all, damn near EVERYONE gets Cities XL FPS drop. Serious FPS drop.
And that's it for the past 4 years. From the perspective of an eager SimCity fan, this idea of SimCity the MMO is a slap to the face. It tells them that they don't have any kind of say in their favoured genre, and no games will be made to cater towards them any more. While it is perhaps a legitimate debate to argue to what degree they have a right to demand a certain type of game from a company, it's very easy to see where this bad blood comes from. The only solution to this (another example of the AAA gaming industry refusing to plug gaps in the market) is Kickstarter, but I don't believe it can raise the kind of funds needed to make the game the fans wanted.
People just want a nice, slick, modern city-building/management game. That's all. But no, it has to be "social", it has to be an "Always-Connected experience" (again, I must stress that "sometimes connected" is more accurate. My offline games run 24/7, no problem. The only games I can't access are those dependent on servers.)
In EA's Brave New World, the consumer has no options. No choices. It's their way or nothing. Fuck the lot of 'em.
/sarcasm.
