SimCity Offline-Mode Patch Won't Be Arriving "Any Time Soon"
- Thread starter Timothy Chang
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Wait until a the always online DRM is removed. If that doesn't happen, don't buy it. Save you a lot of grief and frustration. There's always Tropico 3 and SimCity 4, amongst other options, to slate your city building appetite.
Did you play Diablo 3, or are you just saying this based on what people are saying around the internet?AuronFtw said:
D3 is not "hilariously, joke-quality bad", not by a large margin. It's a fun, solid game that has a bunch of problems in its game design with itemization and the AH, yes, but it's not "bad" by any stretch of the imagination. The game has sold 12 million copies since launch (which means it has not only sold well on launch itself but kept selling well), a feat few games have managed. Games that sell well tend to be highly-pirated.
No, D3 is not much pirated because it's really hard to pirate. By all accounts, D3's DRM is a huge success. Don't delude yourself that the game isn't pirated because you think everyone agrees with your opinion about D3.
Yes, but "fail" is not a good word for that. Ask any publisher and they will tell you that any DRM that holds up for 2 months or more is a big, rousing success. Every developer knows that any copy protection can eventually be circumvented, but what matters (for the publishers, at least) is that they don't have pirated copies in the first few months, when 80% or more of the game sales are done anyway.chadachada123 said:
So as long as they reclassify games as online or multiplayer experiences, it'll be okay.evilneko said:
Technically speaking, you're right.NotSoNimble said:
Diablo III still doesn't have a full, working crack, because half of the game isn't run from the player's computer. Seems to be something people often miss.
Granted, while I don't mind the always-online DRM for ostensibly multi-player focused titles such as Diablo III (yes, it was rather multi-player focused) and the new SimCity, I really don't want it working its way into single-player titles like The Witcher 2 or Dishonored. Like it did with, say... Assassin's Creed...
EDIT: Though technically, I don't actually support the use of such DRM. I got Diablo III for free out of Blizzard's World of Warcraft year-long subscription promotion, and I won't be buying SimCity. I don't generally buy multi-player centric games, which is why I don't want more of them becoming as such and thus using such extreme DRM.
I don't really see it as a shame, rather someone putting down a zombified loved one.Antari said:
One can dream. Who knows? Perhaps EA will fall or at very least start living up to the values it set itself.Antari said:
I wouldn't bet on it although.
What did you just say about Katawa Shoujo.NotSoNimble said:
Okay I know that this is far from the point, however:
Katawa Shoujo is not Japanese
It is not about 'scoring cripples'
It is a free game
The developers released the torrent themselves.
So you can straw man piracy, you can defend EA, but when you denounce KS you have gone to far.
My vote is for a fall as hard as the disappointment they have dished out over the years. EA can never take my dreams away. They have certainly tried, but I won't let them. As for change, they haven't changed much at all in around 15 years. I won't be holding my breath. I've seen them do this time and time again. The only concern they have now, is the next customer. Not the ones they let down.Ed130 said:
You realize that Diablo 3 was cracked quite quickly don't you? Always online literally did nothing to stop pirates from playing it if they want. But even assuming your statement that it's not highly pirated was correct, which do you think had more to do with it: always online DRM or the fact that there was a huge community backlash against the game as many felt it just wasn't very good?NotSoNimble said:
I don't know about you, but I can't imagine why pirates would care to play a game that wasn't very well received outside of the press.
As for being a commercial success, that has nothing to do with DRM and everything to do with it being a Diablo game made by Blizzard. Had you (or even better, Maxis) paid attention to it's launch you probably would have found that the always online DRM didn't work out of the gate and actually drove off customers.
And finally, I love that you think gamers should be thankful that Maxis is working to update and fix the game aggressively. Yeah, it's better than them throwing their arms up and saying "fuck it. We're done." But the idea that anyone who paid money for a game that doesn't even work at release and even days later is absurd. Take your corporate apologist attitude somewhere else thanks.
You mean Katawa Shoujo? The entirely free game that the developers actively put up as a torrent and deliberately made getting it from torrent sites the official way of acquiring the game, that Katawa Shoujo? Seeing as how it's literally impossible to pirate a game specifically meant to be freeware and is officially distributed through torrents, using it as an example of a game that's heavily pirated seriously damages the validity of your argument as a whole and makes you look extremely ignorant, even if you have some otherwise very valid points and examples. Do some research next time before you say something that you clearly don't know much about.NotSoNimble said:
Now if you were talking about some other game that I haven't heard of that has an anime-style and involves having sex with "cripples" as you put it, then I'll take back what I just said. However, Katawa Shoujo became well known entirely for those reasons and is the only game I've ever heard of that fits your description - let alone out of the games released in the past five years - so I can only assume that is the you're talking about.
Captcha: "words of wisdom"
EDIT: I see that I've been ninja'd. Oh well, my point still stands.
I am surprised how many people didn't read the tweets, and just deciced to jump on the "always online drm" bandwagon. Heck, I am surprised that people have not been very well educated on the design philosophy of this game from its very inception.
Here's the fact of the matter. SimCity, from the very beginning, was designed to be an online multiplayer game. They indicated this when they first revealed the game, and again when they tweeted responses to questions yesterday. They have most of the simulations occuring on the server instead of the local client likely because local clients could not handle processing each little individual detail of each and every Sim in the city, and all activity happening simultaniously across a region, a change from the data driven approach taken in SimCity 4.
To say this game should be offline is like saying that Dota 2 and World of Warcraft, similarly, should have full offline modes. Anything else from Blizzard and Valve is DRM in its most heinous form.
That isn't to say that they shouldn't have had their s*** together and had their servers in full working order at launch to handle the load. THAT is inexcuseable.
Here's the fact of the matter. SimCity, from the very beginning, was designed to be an online multiplayer game. They indicated this when they first revealed the game, and again when they tweeted responses to questions yesterday. They have most of the simulations occuring on the server instead of the local client likely because local clients could not handle processing each little individual detail of each and every Sim in the city, and all activity happening simultaniously across a region, a change from the data driven approach taken in SimCity 4.
To say this game should be offline is like saying that Dota 2 and World of Warcraft, similarly, should have full offline modes. Anything else from Blizzard and Valve is DRM in its most heinous form.
That isn't to say that they shouldn't have had their s*** together and had their servers in full working order at launch to handle the load. THAT is inexcuseable.
But it has a singleplayer mode. If it's supposed to be multiplayer then they shouldn't have put in a singleplayer mode in the first place.Nocturnus said:
You are ignoring the most important part of my post. One can play solo in Dota (with bots) or in WoW no problem as well. However, all the moving pieces behind those games are done by the server. SimCity is no different due to the change in model from data driven (lots of statistics) to full blown individual and grand scale simulation: each individual Sim rendered and managed as a piece of the working puzzle, and the entire region being run simultaniously with all those pieces interacting.Genocidicles said:
Managing that on the local client would turn even my really nice gaming rig into a steaming pile of rubble. Making the game manageable offline would require them changing the entire basis of the game from full simulation to data driven, and they aren't going to do that.
If that were the case, it wouldn't work when the server cuts out (it continues for about 10 minutes). From another post on one of the other sim city threads:Nocturnus said: