Sounds like you wanted that single-player (also the problem with always-online is it doesn't affect 99% of us, meaning that 1% of people get screwed and there's no-one left to care)
SimCity Is Broken, And It's Not Just the Servers
- Thread starter Greg Tito
- Start date
"...not our official opinion..." As usual, while the games industry burns down around them, the 'journalists' fiddle.
The game is broken. It should be reviewed AS IT WAS RELEASED TO CONSUMERS. Anything else is base cowardice, fearing for ad revenue provided by the games industry and "exclusives."
Would you review a car the same way? "Looks nice, but we're going to hold our reviews for a month until Ford puts working engines in."
How about a restaurant? "Waiter shat on our plates, but we'll wait until the replacement meal comes out before giving you our full review."
Review. The. Damned. Game. As. Shipped.
The game is broken. It should be reviewed AS IT WAS RELEASED TO CONSUMERS. Anything else is base cowardice, fearing for ad revenue provided by the games industry and "exclusives."
Would you review a car the same way? "Looks nice, but we're going to hold our reviews for a month until Ford puts working engines in."
How about a restaurant? "Waiter shat on our plates, but we'll wait until the replacement meal comes out before giving you our full review."
Review. The. Damned. Game. As. Shipped.
30 hours, three cities and a grand project in and I can only agree - the game is fun but it's not really working from the mechanical point of view. The things that stuck out to me in particular are the following:
* Small city size: makes sense from a design-perspective as it forces one to develop a tactic to squeeze the maximum of inhabitants, industry and commercial buildings out of the available space. The only problem: that's just one hell of an annoyance if you really want to build a city and not an oversized village or like to give it any kind of soul - there's simply too less space for that. How about the following: allow bigger city sizes, fix the number of specializations to a maximum of two and make the trade-port/trading centre a non-specialization building (it's simply too important for that). I can easily imagine how cool it would be to just make the city size variable such that you can drag and drop the size across the region until it is filled up or borders the great work or such.
* Round streets are a no-no: since the pathing is just so ridiculously broken and the buildings need a certain space in their largest variant one can't so easily see without just trying to zone, any non-rectangular street-setups usually messes up stuff. And considering that I like eccentric cities with a little bit of soul to them instead of the planned roboticness that I didn't like in SC4 for instance that's a wasted opportunity in my book.
* No continuous resource trading: one is only able to share production goods between cities via one-shot gifts - and that's idiotic pure and simple. In a game so obviously designed around sharing between cities it would make perfect sense to have one city produce alloys and let another use them for consumer electronics. Too bad one has to currently jump between the cities every other minute to gift a new batch of resources to the other. It's an annoying design-oversight.
* Messed up vehicle sharing: together with the horrible pathing makes vehicle sharing a double edged sort. If you build a hospital (which annoyingly seems to be one of the most expensive buildings to run) it simply doesn't solve the health issues of another city, it just means a whole lot of wasted money. It seemed to work with my police precinct, though, but only barely.
* Contradictory or simple lack of feedback: shared garbage with another city so that I didn't have to put a land-value dropping piece of thrash in my tourist trapping-gambling city, turns out I never received any kind of feedback about how the garbage was pilling up and poisoned my ground water supply. I might have just missed it, but the lack of feedback really annoyed me there. In other things, the feedback also seems strangely disjunct and never really conveys enough information about what is going on or how the development and shopping actually works, how to get rid of homeless or why on earth my industry plant right next to a trade-port complains about a lack of freight capacity - strange to say it in a game that prides itself on all those nice looking informative charts in the glassbox engine. Then again, I might have missed out a tutorial or where to find that info...
* Water supply is annoying as hell: I don't want to always have to switch around my water-pumps to the non-white areas of an already filled up map. Can't we have a way to get that supply automatically refilled? Like desalination plants, university research or a much deeper supply?
* Oversized goals: In agreement with Greg those intermediate goals for upgrades to the centers are either ridiculously low (gambling) or ridiculously high (electronics) - and considering one needs the trade-port due to a lack of space, faster selling times and more storage capacity that's extremely annoying (also don't get me started on the university).
* The tax-system: considering I thought I was smart by constructing an exhaustive public transport system in all my cities from the start, I never got to deviate much in terms of taxes from the 10% mark. Given that everything above 11% seems to lead to the quick demise of your city and there's usually not enough money below 9% and you are certainly always in the red when trying to produce goods it seemed rather pointless to me except to possibly speed up the early game.
* No terraforming: I still recall those fun times in SC2000 when I built a city across mountaintops and even labeled some cool landmarks in that whole thing. I can't do that anymore or build any kind of interesting height differences or make more room by drying up some parts of the ocean. I could also imagine that this would allow for cool user generated regions. Another wasted opportunity in my book.
* Bugs, Bugs, Bugs: why isn't my recycling center working despite having a full materials storage and empty goods storages? Why is that glob of sewage not going away from that particular point on the streets despite my capacities being more than enough? Why are all of my six fire trucks at one burning building while another two burn down? Why doesn't my trade port sell stuff?
As for my personal perspective about fixing all of this I'm not really sure if this is going to be done to the point of creating a game that is worth more than one look. EA has already sold up to 1,1 million copies [http://www.4players.de/4players.php/spielinfonews/PC-CDROM/30137/2130391/SimCity%7C11_Mio_Mal_verkauft.html] and I'm not convinced that EA really cares too much about public opinion to put itself behind fixing more than the most extreme issues. The only way I can see this becoming a properly balanced game are mods - and those are bound to not be allowed by EA and it's insistence on the always online DRM aspects of the game. On the other hand, at least in this way I got 30 hours of playtime from a broken game and either DS3 or BF3 for "free".....go figure...
EDIT: I should also mention that after buying the game last Tuesday, I didn't have any kind of connectivity issues at all and I don't have any particular complains about the always-online aspects as of yet.
* Small city size: makes sense from a design-perspective as it forces one to develop a tactic to squeeze the maximum of inhabitants, industry and commercial buildings out of the available space. The only problem: that's just one hell of an annoyance if you really want to build a city and not an oversized village or like to give it any kind of soul - there's simply too less space for that. How about the following: allow bigger city sizes, fix the number of specializations to a maximum of two and make the trade-port/trading centre a non-specialization building (it's simply too important for that). I can easily imagine how cool it would be to just make the city size variable such that you can drag and drop the size across the region until it is filled up or borders the great work or such.
* Round streets are a no-no: since the pathing is just so ridiculously broken and the buildings need a certain space in their largest variant one can't so easily see without just trying to zone, any non-rectangular street-setups usually messes up stuff. And considering that I like eccentric cities with a little bit of soul to them instead of the planned roboticness that I didn't like in SC4 for instance that's a wasted opportunity in my book.
* No continuous resource trading: one is only able to share production goods between cities via one-shot gifts - and that's idiotic pure and simple. In a game so obviously designed around sharing between cities it would make perfect sense to have one city produce alloys and let another use them for consumer electronics. Too bad one has to currently jump between the cities every other minute to gift a new batch of resources to the other. It's an annoying design-oversight.
* Messed up vehicle sharing: together with the horrible pathing makes vehicle sharing a double edged sort. If you build a hospital (which annoyingly seems to be one of the most expensive buildings to run) it simply doesn't solve the health issues of another city, it just means a whole lot of wasted money. It seemed to work with my police precinct, though, but only barely.
* Contradictory or simple lack of feedback: shared garbage with another city so that I didn't have to put a land-value dropping piece of thrash in my tourist trapping-gambling city, turns out I never received any kind of feedback about how the garbage was pilling up and poisoned my ground water supply. I might have just missed it, but the lack of feedback really annoyed me there. In other things, the feedback also seems strangely disjunct and never really conveys enough information about what is going on or how the development and shopping actually works, how to get rid of homeless or why on earth my industry plant right next to a trade-port complains about a lack of freight capacity - strange to say it in a game that prides itself on all those nice looking informative charts in the glassbox engine. Then again, I might have missed out a tutorial or where to find that info...
* Water supply is annoying as hell: I don't want to always have to switch around my water-pumps to the non-white areas of an already filled up map. Can't we have a way to get that supply automatically refilled? Like desalination plants, university research or a much deeper supply?
* Oversized goals: In agreement with Greg those intermediate goals for upgrades to the centers are either ridiculously low (gambling) or ridiculously high (electronics) - and considering one needs the trade-port due to a lack of space, faster selling times and more storage capacity that's extremely annoying (also don't get me started on the university).
* The tax-system: considering I thought I was smart by constructing an exhaustive public transport system in all my cities from the start, I never got to deviate much in terms of taxes from the 10% mark. Given that everything above 11% seems to lead to the quick demise of your city and there's usually not enough money below 9% and you are certainly always in the red when trying to produce goods it seemed rather pointless to me except to possibly speed up the early game.
* No terraforming: I still recall those fun times in SC2000 when I built a city across mountaintops and even labeled some cool landmarks in that whole thing. I can't do that anymore or build any kind of interesting height differences or make more room by drying up some parts of the ocean. I could also imagine that this would allow for cool user generated regions. Another wasted opportunity in my book.
* Bugs, Bugs, Bugs: why isn't my recycling center working despite having a full materials storage and empty goods storages? Why is that glob of sewage not going away from that particular point on the streets despite my capacities being more than enough? Why are all of my six fire trucks at one burning building while another two burn down? Why doesn't my trade port sell stuff?
As for my personal perspective about fixing all of this I'm not really sure if this is going to be done to the point of creating a game that is worth more than one look. EA has already sold up to 1,1 million copies [http://www.4players.de/4players.php/spielinfonews/PC-CDROM/30137/2130391/SimCity%7C11_Mio_Mal_verkauft.html] and I'm not convinced that EA really cares too much about public opinion to put itself behind fixing more than the most extreme issues. The only way I can see this becoming a properly balanced game are mods - and those are bound to not be allowed by EA and it's insistence on the always online DRM aspects of the game. On the other hand, at least in this way I got 30 hours of playtime from a broken game and either DS3 or BF3 for "free".....go figure...
EDIT: I should also mention that after buying the game last Tuesday, I didn't have any kind of connectivity issues at all and I don't have any particular complains about the always-online aspects as of yet.
I'm with the others. Review the game as it is, right now.
I'm sorry but this is stinking of "we don't want to offend publisher". They screwed up, it's not your fault. Don't piss on your customers by licking boots.
Harsh, but I don't like that policy of "let's wait until they fix it." I can understand that when servers are not working because servers not working means the game itself can't be run. But now? It's not the case anymore.
RELEASE the review.
I'm sorry but this is stinking of "we don't want to offend publisher". They screwed up, it's not your fault. Don't piss on your customers by licking boots.
Harsh, but I don't like that policy of "let's wait until they fix it." I can understand that when servers are not working because servers not working means the game itself can't be run. But now? It's not the case anymore.
RELEASE the review.
All these "review the game as shipped" comments are absurd.
What if Half-Life 3 was released on Steam and it was so popular that it literally crashed the Steam servers so no-one could download it? Would it be appropriate to review it as "Couldn't even play the game; Rubbish. 0%"? Of course it wouldn't.
EA certainly should have handled the release of the game better, but the problems were down to the servers, not the game itself.
Further, the simple fact is that we now live in a time where games can change significantly from their launch form, and that's not an inherently bad thing. It used to be that the launched version of the game was all the game would ever be, and so reviewing the launch version was appropriate, now that's no longer true and so altering review policies to match the changing state of game development is reasonable.
Now, certainly, such a change could be taken too far the other way, where a reviewer ends up never actually reviewing the game as they always end up waiting for the next change before doing the review. As such each reviewer needs to be able to decide for themselves when the appropriate time is to start a review. Some may very well decide to stick to a strict "At release" mandate but I personally would not take such reviewers particularly seriously.
Edit: And no, reviewing a game later is not something done for the sake of the publisher, it's something done for the sake of the player.
Sure, the first two weeks seems a like big deal at the time, but once you've owned a game for a year that just a few percent of your potential play time.
Why on Earth should I prefer a review that focuses on the state of the game for less than 5% of the time I might play it, over a review that focuses on the other 95%?
What if Half-Life 3 was released on Steam and it was so popular that it literally crashed the Steam servers so no-one could download it? Would it be appropriate to review it as "Couldn't even play the game; Rubbish. 0%"? Of course it wouldn't.
EA certainly should have handled the release of the game better, but the problems were down to the servers, not the game itself.
Further, the simple fact is that we now live in a time where games can change significantly from their launch form, and that's not an inherently bad thing. It used to be that the launched version of the game was all the game would ever be, and so reviewing the launch version was appropriate, now that's no longer true and so altering review policies to match the changing state of game development is reasonable.
Now, certainly, such a change could be taken too far the other way, where a reviewer ends up never actually reviewing the game as they always end up waiting for the next change before doing the review. As such each reviewer needs to be able to decide for themselves when the appropriate time is to start a review. Some may very well decide to stick to a strict "At release" mandate but I personally would not take such reviewers particularly seriously.
Edit: And no, reviewing a game later is not something done for the sake of the publisher, it's something done for the sake of the player.
Sure, the first two weeks seems a like big deal at the time, but once you've owned a game for a year that just a few percent of your potential play time.
Why on Earth should I prefer a review that focuses on the state of the game for less than 5% of the time I might play it, over a review that focuses on the other 95%?
Well said. This is the type of thing that is more objective than almost any review out there currently. Forget the fact that the "Always Connected" part is broken. Forget the part where they forced you online. While it's unacceptable for designers to force users into such a thing (in my book, anyway, it's fine for the users that are not bothered by this), no one has actually mentioned how the game is in reference to the way it's supposed to work. And the fact that the games built in pathfinding breaks everything about a city is an issue. I would imagine that bottlenecking the player into creating a city that is incapable of self sustainment is game breaking as well, but that game is meant to happen, so take it as it is. It sounds to me like when it's working as it's meant to, it's still broken.
Okay, two things. First of all, he doesn't care about those things because A) they're old news and B) that horse was dead, buried, and the grave still being beaten on 2 weeks before SimCity came out. No one wants to read the exact same story over and over again. Secondly, when in the hell did it become imperative to become an activist about everything? Last time I checked, gaming was about fun. While you sit there raging about how EA is screwing over the consumer, I'm going to be sitting here building skyscrapers and watching Godzilla tear them down, laughing like a fool, and enjoying myself. If I had to choose between us who was "doing it right", as it were, I would say the one ACTUALLY HAVING FUN, not the one scowling at a computer screen hating everything about the industry. Sure I know I'm getting cheesed over in a lot of these cases, but you know what, as long as I'm having fun, then I don't give a rat's ass. It's my entertainment, just who the hell do you think you are to judge me for it?defskyoen said:
And before you go throwing around "cancer on the industry" and "shilling out" accusations, I'd suggest you THINK for a half second. The majority opinion on the game is that the DRM is balls, but past that is an amazing game; this writer dares to day "actually, that second part sucks too." Yup, sound like he sold his soul to EA long ago, to accuse their game of being inherently broken at the core. Before to say that he's the cancer on the entertainment industry, try not to act like the cancer on the comments section.
What's so threatening about a ban if you can just "be back"? To think that I've been all nice to people and upstanding for nuthin! : )AC10 said:
OT again: Cities XL even looks better than this. I guess all that's selling is a name in this case.
A non existent game does not make for a good analogy in this case. Especially since you seemed to miss the point entirely of this article.Maze1125 said:
Greg is ignoring the launch issues. He says he is sick of talking about it. This entire article is devoted to alerting people to the essentially broken game underneath the shit mountain that was its launch.
Fundamental components of the GAME, basic mechanics and functions, fall apart under extended play times (note that I'm saying roughly 4-6 hours of play... in older simcities 10-20 hours would be considered a short venture). The online functionality that was, seemingly, the sole direction they were going for with this game, is also counter productive to the experience. There is no synergy between neighbouring towns despite it being the entire point of the online component... if anything the presence of other towns in your region only hampers your progress.
Then there is the endgame, which completely destroys the potential flexibility for an avid sims fan. You are railroaded into a specific industry, exasperated by limited space, with infrastructure that seemingly fails to accomplish basic tasks and important (and expensive) services that often fail to accomplish their only purpose regardless of a players attempt to optimise their cities layouts.
Also, as a poster above mentioned, its quite possible to sabotage an entire region by fiddling with the shitty AI and exploiting its retarded pathfinding. The game fails to create a pleasant experience for groups and seemingly makes trolling other players the only viable means to derive enjoyment from the game. That is not the experience the average gamer wants, not just sim city fans.
The game should be reviewed under the merits of its gameplay. Simcity is broken fundamentally. People desperately want this game to work out and too many allowances are being made for its benefit.
A few sites have already recalled their initial reviews and posted reassessed versions. Greg shouldn't shy away from this grilling, it will only look bad on him in the long run.
I believe you may have misunderstood my post, as I cannot see any relation between what I said and your response to it.Ragsnstitches said:
I wasn't commenting on the article, I was commenting on the people who, in the comments, complained about Greg postponing his review because of the server issues. I was disagreeing with those people as I believe postponing the review in cases such as this is perfectly appropriate.
Edit: And, as for an non-existent game being a bad analogy? Okay, here's an edited version that's entirely true:
What if, when Half-Life 2 was released on Steam and it was so popular that it literally crashed the Steam servers so no-one could download it? Would it have been appropriate to review it as "Couldn't even play the game; Rubbish. 0%"? Of course it wouldn't.
You can build 100% Residential regions without needing to build commerce or industry at all, which can troll public games by sending thousands of sims to clog other players' streets and with the Debug mode making the rounds, people can also troll public games by laying down highways outside their cities and build things for free.
People doing these things have also proven that the game inflates the real population of cities to hide that they're actually smaller than they already are.
I'd say it's broken when these things make playing the game pointless.
People doing these things have also proven that the game inflates the real population of cities to hide that they're actually smaller than they already are.
I'd say it's broken when these things make playing the game pointless.
Fair enough. Though I disagree. The review is an important tool for people who wish to purchase a game... if the game is broken people should know since it is their own money that is being wasted.Maze1125 said:
Honestly, this game shouldn't have been released as is... and it should be rated by the quality of the product on offer, not its potential.
EA and Maxis should get burned for this mess, though if they follow through and fix the myriad of problems it has, they should have their ratings amended. The product available to the consumer is what is important, not hot air and untrustworthy promises.
I totally agree with you on this. It seems like the people complaining about them not reviewing the game as shipped are less interested in actually finding out what the game's like rather than seeing someone else taking their turn to jump up and down on the game for its launch issues.Maze1125 said:
Obviously a review shouldn't gloss over bugs and other issues if they're present, but a lot of good games get bad reputations over problems that have long since been resolved. Especially Obsidian ones. You should only review a buggy game if you're prepared to soldier on through bugs and errors to review it every bit as thoroughly as you would a less buggy game, otherwise you're just giving a review that probably won't be relevant in a few months time.
EDIT: Of course if it is buggy you should probably put up something saying that it is and that's why you're not reviewing it for now... But that's what's been done here.
Another annual milestone for EA, following the previous Spring* disasters of The Old Republic and Mass Effect 3.
ToR was just mediocre and bland and ME3's only major sin was the copout ending.
But SimCity 2013 raises the stakes by not only featuring a disastrous launch, but also being a shitty game on top of it.
*[sub]Spring in the Northern Hemisphere. My apologies to the Aussies among us.[/sub]
ToR was just mediocre and bland and ME3's only major sin was the copout ending.
But SimCity 2013 raises the stakes by not only featuring a disastrous launch, but also being a shitty game on top of it.
*[sub]Spring in the Northern Hemisphere. My apologies to the Aussies among us.[/sub]
Fair enough, but I think that the review should be out already, reflecting all those problems in its score. Delaying in order to give EA a chance is much more than every other game have.
I can get behind in waiting for a day or two to test the game outside of a controlled environment, but more than that is kind of useless from the consumer point of view and EA gets a free pass on the first weak, that so important sales window.
Yes, I know the site has being very thorough covering the whole server history and this article is definitively a step in the right direction, but delaying the review seems unfair with other games that got much better with patches and corrections in their first weeks.
In the end, I respect the reviewer decision, but if it was me, the review would be out and all the game problems would be reflected on the score. If and when the game changed something (for better or worse) I would report on the site. In my opinion it is important, from a consumer point of view to pressure companies to get right the first time.
I can get behind in waiting for a day or two to test the game outside of a controlled environment, but more than that is kind of useless from the consumer point of view and EA gets a free pass on the first weak, that so important sales window.
Yes, I know the site has being very thorough covering the whole server history and this article is definitively a step in the right direction, but delaying the review seems unfair with other games that got much better with patches and corrections in their first weeks.
In the end, I respect the reviewer decision, but if it was me, the review would be out and all the game problems would be reflected on the score. If and when the game changed something (for better or worse) I would report on the site. In my opinion it is important, from a consumer point of view to pressure companies to get right the first time.
It is a tad bit funny though, considering you'd need to take accidental trolling into account when you do anything. Watching streams of the game, I found myself thinking "couldn't I just make a city that is basically a city sized mall with a police box on every corner?" The answer is yes, if I don't mind screwing with other players.GAunderrated said: