Kahani said:
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I'm going to have to disagree there. Sure, there's no reason for SimCity to force you to be online. But ultimately, if the game actually worked and was actually fun, that wouldn't stop an awful lot of people playing it. For all the complaints Diablo 3 gets it's still a very successful and popular game, not least because Blizzard actually listen to their customers and try to fix the real problems. The main problem with SimCity is not that you need the internet, it's that the game is just fundamentally broken. Cities are far too small, resources are bizarrely finite, sims don't even have assigned homes or jobs, the pathfinding is somehow worse than in previous games, and so on. And EA/Maxis just don't give a fuck, and instead just focus on telling us it's all fine and trying to flog ever more pointless micro-transactions. A version of SimCity 4 that forced you to be online would be a good game that happened to have a bit of an annoyance tacked on for no good reason. A version of SimCity 6 that allowed you to be offline would still be shit.
Don't you mean SimCity 5?
I don't think they counted Societies.
However MOST (read most not all) of SimCity 5's problems and horrible design are endemic to the online features. Why are our towns the size of a sand grain? Online features! Why are services so expensive and why is SimCity akin to a nightmare version of Soviet Russia where nobody pays for any public service? In reality that sewer system I built would require a tax to use, literally called sewage tax. The answer is Online features so you are more motivated to centralize a single resource or service in a single city and share it. Why do factories offer so many jobs? A few simple factories could offer work to a town of nearly 100'000, perhaps because only 1/8 people actually works, I guess the SimCity devs are stuck in the 1950's housewive mentality, but the answer is again obvious, so that cities could again be specialized to house only one type of building and they even made a great work based exactly on that. The Arcology(yes I know it was in earlier games) is basically a giant worker hive that will send out workers to other cities. Not to mention that they freeze the city when you leave which is perhaps the cheapest and stupidest way to encourage multiplayer play.
So for MOST (read most not all) of SimCity 5's many many many problems I can find a direct link back to the online features.
Now other things like the Resource-Sink system, the drill to the forehead stupid AI, the ridiculous tax system where anything above 11 will force Sims to leave. Welcome to the real world SimCity devs I pay 18% and when I work fulltime I pay 41%. Both have not yet caused me to leave my town.
Those are just built into the hardware, however these could also be fixed with separate patches.
Also I am a huge Diablo fan. The words Always Online, means that I have NO idea how Diablo 3 plays because I did not buy it. Don't be mistaken I did not buy SimCity myself, it was a birthday present because my friends knew I loved to play the previous games. Can you imagine my face when I opened up the package to find the game that I had shunned for so long?
