EA Admits That SimCity Could Have Been Offline

[Ruley]

Artistic vision is all well and good and i respect it, i do. However, forcing always online is not part of the artistic vision. You envisioned a multiplayer focused simcity and rather putting in any extra effort to accommodate larger, single player offline cities (something that WOULDN'T have touched your artistic vision of multiplayer, as it would be a separate option), you've forced players to learn about the regional city integration. something that, in my experience, DOESN'T WORK and is bugged to high hell and back. Rather than offering the classic experience as an option, you shrunk the city size down, but that's ok because you always have to be online so you'll always be able to play multiplayer. Yes, i'm always able to play multiplayer games, but then why do i own Skyrim and other single player games?

In Simcity, i loved tweaking with every aspect of the city and expanding it. but i've hit the city boundary so fast, i have to move on. my regional cities don't feel connected. i don't feel invested in it because of how fast i can reach endgame stuff.

I'm seriously questioning my long term enjoyment of this game without larger city sizes, something that was compromised by your artistic vision.

 

[themilo504]

Oh you can go to hell ea using ?artistic vision? as a excuse even if it is true(which it isn?t) it?s still incredibly stupid why would you alienate your old fans for people who most likely find SimCity too complicated.

And it backfired spectacularly since any non fans who picked up this game will get frustrated by the connection issues quit playing and never pick up a SimCity game again.

If I ever do buy the game I?m going to use a mod to play it offline.

 

[MPZero]

Well another game EA dumped out i have little to no intrest in touching..its a shame relly it would of been something good to play when im at work with no internet... ah well.. back to Minecraft

 

[raankh]

Her statements are as misleading as ever.

There's nothing that prevents an implementation of that design with peer-to-peer connectivity for region sharing, where those computations they now do centrally would have happened on each players client. That's also "always-on", but it doesn't have a single point of failure.

The fact of the matter is that it is the authentication that needs to be centralized. All else is bullshit.

 

[Sigmund Av Volsung]

EA has no artistic vision; all of their recent games were churned out to make money, not to inspire someone.

EA is now a company, and have long since abandoned their roots, so they shouldn't hide behind weak-sauce excuses like the ones in the article.

It makes me both angry and sad when I hear the *challenge everything* jingle at the beginning of SimCity 4.
Also it makes me laugh because I imagine that "challenge everything" nowadays includes bad business practices.

Here ya go guy... try these out...

http://community.simtropolis.com/files/file/26793-network-addon-mod-for-windows-installer/

http://community.simtropolis.com/files/file/28544-sc4-launcher/

Challenge everything? Yeah... maybe a couple years ago... now I just turn it off.

Umm, thanks for the launcher(though I don't understand why you linked those mods) as I've just started playing SimCity 4;I thought that this year's release would be my first intro to the game series, but I don't need to explain why that's no longer a desirable option.

Though I have to say I'm terrible at SimCity 4; I only made one city in which my residents were happy AND I was making money, at all other times, I spend way too much money on amenities and I barely have any high-income housing.

 

[Vivi22]

If Maxis says that they put it in, then you might want to not put EA in teh title.

Maxis is a wholly owned subsidiary of EA. They are no less a part of EA than any other development studio EA owns. The only reason it even kept the name it originally had is probably because there was too much recognition of it for their previous Sim games before EA bought them.

 

[Scars Unseen]

My apologies, Maxis. My vision is too compromised by the bullshit you've been flinging for me to see your point now. Try honesty earlier in the conversation next time, please.

 

[barbzilla]

"It's not our place to question Maxis' artistic vision"

No, it is exactly the place of the paying customers and fans to question it's "artistic vision"

That is exactly the argument that many fans in favor of an easy mode for dark souls used, then they got bashed for not respecting artistic integrity. Of course the difference being that this game is shit, and DS was great (in my opinion).

OT: I am with the crowd here. I don't normally partake in the EA bashing that goes on around here. I do, however, always wait for their games to get reviewed properly before I buy one. Lucky for me I didn't waste my money on this flop (too bad this was actually one of the better looking EA games this year). As for Maxis' statement... I have to call BS. This is just damage control. They know that many gamers are trying to push video games as art, so they think they can muscle a bit of quiet out of the artistic crowd. You can't call artistic vision on DRM Maxis... On the game maybe, but if that was an artistic choice for the game only, you wouldn't have lied about the servers needing to do the calculations.

This is just one big cover-up fiasco and it won't work.

 

[Gypsyssilver]

Slight problem here, if it was part of their "vision" and not a shallow and poorly disguised attempt to control players, why did they repeatedly state that they couldn't make it single player as the game required their servers to do a large portion of the calculations which has now been proved a colossal lie?

Exactly! That's what gets me - why bother lying?

If it really was just due to their 'vision' for how the game should be - they should have been upfront about it. "This is what we wanted to make, you can choose to play it or not". I'd have to respect that (though I'd still be disappointed of course).

That's not what they did though. They lied about it - for reasons best known to themselves. I honestly can't think of what they thought they'd accomplish by saying they "couldn't" change Sim City to have an offline mode. Were they trying to defuse the wave of gamer-rage? It didn't work - people didn't care about why there were limitations - just that the limitations existed at all.

And now everyone knows it wasn't even true...

Wow.

Well done Maxis, well done.

You're a guiding light to other game developers - showing them all exactly how it should be done.

No wait, the opposite to that.

 

[Xanadu84]

Way to answer a criticism with a different criticism.

Imagine going to a pizza joint and ordering a nice cheese pizza, and the waitress comes back and gives you a pepperoni pizza. You complain, "Hey, I wanted a cheese pizza!". The waitress tells you that lots of people like pepperoni, that is what people want. You say, "Well that's fine, i'm sure pepperoni is great, but I'm a damn vegetarian, all you had to do was NOT put it on mine and everyone else can enjoy there pepperoni". As you go to pick off the pepperoni, she slaps your hand away. Confused, you go to pick the pepperoni off again, and she flips the table, sending yours and many other people's pizza to the floor. Apologetically, she says, "Sorry, your going to have to wait a while until we bring you more pizza. But we will bring you free breadsticks". Then she looks at you and says, "It will go well with your PEPPERONI pizza".

Online in Simcity is great. You can create a massive, interconnected ecosystem that is fascinating to explore, and the design is wonderful. I got it and let me tell you, the dynamic between my friends city and mine is one of the most fun things ive seen in a game in a while (Periodically, I complain that all his low educated, high density industrial laborors keep coming to my city as theifs and arsons and lower my property values, and then he points out that he occasionally throws me half a million dollars or so so I can make cool stuff that also helps him. I also rely on him to fill the lower income jobs. It's downright topical.) But it would have taken little effort, or probably even NEGATIVE effort, to include a feature that people want, and that would have made the Simcity release disaster seem much less awkward. All they had to do was periodically point out that certain services could be provided by neighboring towns. That could have pushed people to try the multiplayer without jamming it down their throats

 

[Andrew_C]

Umm, thanks for the launcher(though I don't understand why you linked those mods) as I've just started playing SimCity 4;I thought that this year's release would be my first intro to the game series, but I don't need to explain why that's no longer a desirable option.

Though I have to say I'm terrible at SimCity 4; I only made one city in which my residents were happy AND I was making money, at all other times, I spend way too much money on amenities and I barely have any high-income housing.

The traffic network simulator in SC4 is terrible without NAM - almost as braindead as the agents in Simcity 2013. NAM also expands the variety of roads, has curved road puzzle pieces, trams and now includes the Real Highway Mod(RHW) (showcased in the screenshots) and a huge amount of stuff originally written as addons for NAM. In short it expands Sim City 4 incredibly and is really cool.

Even if you don't use anything else (because it can be quite difficult figuring out how to use all the bits properly (I basically just use the roundabouts)) the upgraded traffic simulator makes large cities a lot better as the traffic works more realistically, makes the sims more likely to use mass transit more than they do in the basic game and doesn't get artificially bottlenecked.

 

[rob_simple]

I don't understand how, if it was possible, then giving people the option to play offline would in anyway affect the desires of these thousands of people who wanted to play an MMO.

Ah, artistic vision: The last bastion of the developer with no leg left to stand on.

 

[gentlemanghost]

"But we rejected that [subset offline mode] idea because it didn't fit with our vision."

Can't decide if your "vision" is clouded by your greed or your stupidity...probably both

"But we're also hearing from thousands of people who are playing across regions, trading, communicating and loving the Always-Connected functionality."

Can't decide whether to say "LIES!" or "*cough* *cough* bullshit *cough*"

Show me THREE people who enjoy being forced to stay connected to the Internet to play a SINGLE player game

The only way this article could me more hilarious is if the meteors in the graphic were replaced with feces

 

[The Great JT]

FANS: "There's no reason for SimCity to be online only!"
EA: "Phah, what do you know, you're only fans and we're game developers!"
-Now-
EA: "Erm, don't take this the wrong way, but maybe you were kinda right about that whole 'doesn't need to be online only' thing? Maybe we can agree to disagree on a few things?"

 

[mfeff]

Umm, thanks for the launcher(though I don't understand why you linked those mods) as I've just started playing SimCity 4;I thought that this year's release would be my first intro to the game series, but I don't need to explain why that's no longer a desirable option.

Though I have to say I'm terrible at SimCity 4; I only made one city in which my residents were happy AND I was making money, at all other times, I spend way too much money on amenities and I barely have any high-income housing.

The launcher will save you the trouble of editing the .ini to remove the "intro movie". It also allows for 1080p resolution. The NAM mod is such a major improvement to the roads that no game is complete without it.

 

[Hero in a half shell]

Who are these people who they're hearing from ("thousands of people who are playing across regions, trading, communicating and loving the Always-Connected functionality")?

Seriously, who are these people?

I'm guessing they're EA employees.

I thought this would be a rather boring year because we wouldn't be able to top last year's awful Diablo 3 release and the ME3 outrage, but EA seems to be well on the way to surpassing both of those with this hideous tale of inept management, terrible coding, and corporate lies, and it's only March! EA never disappoints in the drama, because they always disappoint in the games.

 

[Powerman88]

Let me preface this with this. The first Simcity game is the first video game I ever purchased for myself and I have played every iteration since. I have also put in about 23 hours into the new Simcity 5 since it came out. Stick with me on this.

I actually like the small city size and the online functionality. I like the fact you have to plan cities and that you can't just expand willy nilly; you need to be smart about land usage as it is a resource much more precious than money. I like the social aspects and the regional play.

What really bothers me is that this game is a Beta. The traffic is broken. The simulation is not as deep as they advertised. The game shipped broken and they did not plan for success (as a small business owner I see this as ridiculous but whatever).

In the 30 years I have been playing video games I have never had to wait a week to play one. What really bothers me are the apologists in every forum I have been trolling (isn't controversy fun) who have been berating people for being angry at EA. The day we don't expect a full priced product to at least function out of the box is a sad day. We don't owe the developers anything, they owe us. When we give $63.70 USD (or whatever you paid in your country) for a product you are damn right we are entitled to a working product. This isn't 1850 and we aren't buying snake oils from a passing salesman. This is 2013 and we are purchasing a product from a billion dollar company that has been around for a lot of years.

I really wanted to believe in EA. I wanted to believe that they actually could justify the always on DRM and forced online connection, and that the online only was an upgrade. I think it can be. I also think this game needs another year in development and we paid full price for a beta.

With that said, anyone want to join my region on US East 4?