Worgen said:
Draech said:
Worgen said:
Draech said:
Worgen said:
Draech said:
Worgen said:
Draech said:
Worgen said:
Rawne1980 said:
Well, that's going to go about as well as selling ice to Eskimo's.
The truly sad part is people will still throw money at it.
Well, at least my wife can be safe in the knowledge that I won't be spending our money on that game .... ever.
I doubt people will be throwing that much money at it, back in the day simcity was pretty popular but its not like diablo or starcraft where people will bend over and take whatever stupid drm method they want to use. City building games are more of a niche genre then blizzard games are, meaning that doing something like this could really end up hurting ea, I mean they kinda pulled something similar with C&C 4 and that game was a total flop despite being part of a rather strong even at that point, brand.
Back in the day games were a lot less refined than they are today.
The barrier of entry has lowered significantly and games like Minecraft and Farmville does try to cater to the same aesthetics that Sim City caters to.
In the end the price is in the pudding.
C&C 4 failed despite being a established brand on a combination of deviation from original series, poor design and technical incompetence (if you have a game that forces you online at least have the servers up reliably). I highly doubt that C&C 4 would have been a smashing success if only it had been offline.
If they deliver a good game that utilizes the online element to a point where an offline game seems like the lesser game, then they will succeed.
The difference between simcity and farmville, not touching your minecraft comparison. Is that farmville plays itself and is intended to be something you jump onto for a little while then leave, simcity has always been about managing the city and actually doing things that might not end well, in short its a game you can lose unlike farmville, unless they changed it to the city building formula of all those crummy lil games on tablets/phones.
I think it would have been much more successful if it wasn't online required since that would have forced them to reign in some of their stupider decisions, like forcing the player to level up to get access to new units and probably would have let a player control more than one walker at a time or given the walkers more flexibility.
You need to understand what is meant by aesthetic and you will understand why Minecraft is there as well.
It is the creative expression aesthetic (with challenge. See resource management). Large amounts of games are catering to it these days.
Furthermore last time SimCity tried going the "Simulation route" that you are suggesting is the core aesthetic) it failed do to do well (simcity 3000). So it is pretty obvious that moving in this direction is in an effort to do better.
Your still not making much sense, resource management has been with games since the beginning and has never gone away, you find it in almost every single game out there... if not everygame.
I don't know how simulation focused 3000 was since I didn't play it but one that went the opposite route was simcity societies and it was a dud also.
Let me see if I can put it in a way that makes you understand it.
It is creative expression with a small degree of challenge in the form of resource management.
Like Minecraft survival.
However you can go full creative expression with no challenge
Like Minecraft Creative.
Thou minecraft will deliver on more aesthetics that just challenge and expression, but those are the one I am focusing on here.
The whole point is to hit this aesthetic as it is popular (for now at least).
Traditionally simcity isn't about that like the games like farmville are. Farmville is about specificity setting up everything, simcity is more of setting the foundation and then the game builds itself based on the foundation you setup. I doubt they will deviate too much.... ok scratch that, its ea so the only thing you can bet on is that they will do something stupid. If they do deviate too much from that then it will come back to bite them, we saw it happen with the syndicate wars fps and with C&C 4. Plus, this is being released as a $60 game, not some free to play thing like farmville.
You are still not getting it.
I am talking aesthetics not mechanics.
What you just said is mechanically different, but aesthetically the same.
You note at knocking at EA is noted, but completely irrelevant to what I have been saying so far making me think you havn't understood a single word.
You mean the graphical style of the game? Because that does bear some resemblance to games like farmville. I got the impression you were mostly talking about how the game played and the flow of the game.
Aesthetics are the reasons you come to play the game. What it is that is appealing to you, but not in such a basic for as graphics, Sound or gameplay.
I dont think I can cut it out any further.
For example creative would be everything from deciding what your char should look like in an RPG to choosing choosing where and how to build your city in Simcity.
The core aesthetics of the new Simcity that they are going for are the same as Farmville. The ability to design your own ANYTHING and see the results. It doesn't matter that you do it passively or actively. The core aesthetic off the game is still expression. The ability and desire to create.
So when you in your second post argued that they wouldn't get enough of an audience with the changes I argued that the audience is bigger with the changes, because a larger audience that desires this core aesthetics exists today as a result of games like farmville and minecraft.
