Draech said:
le snip
Try the same argument, but instead of MMO's use Dungeon Defenders, L4D, Dota or any racing game. While they can be enjoyed by themselves there is a boon in playing with others through their design while you are perfectly capable to play them by yourself.
The problem is that the long builder type of strategy havn't had success with implementing multiplayer.
Where the examples I used before there were 2 methods of making multiplayer in design. Cooperative play and competitive play.
Both those methods run into a problem with a long build type due to the games being so long. It is hard to have a coop or competitive game if a game session will take 7 hours to complete (example from Settlers).
However Minecraft found a method around the problem of long cooperative play in that they had static servers that hosted the projects. Sim City 5 uses that principal. Having a third party for point of reference. This makes for the cooperative build as a valid game design for Sim City. Now before I have a feeling know what direction you mind is going and that is "minecraft still has a singleplayer so Sim City could as well" And that more or less comes down to the technical aspects and financial constraints. Like I said the original post you quoted "2 completely different builds in order to make it work singleplayer as well as multiplayer.". Minecraft was for quite a while 2 different builds. If you scale that up to the size of Sim City 5 and then add the difficult of handling security for millions of users rather than a whitelist of 24 people, then you should see it is a time and resource constraint that prevents the new Sim City from having an offline mode.
While you do get the gist of it, what you fail to realize that people playing long builder types do so because they want to play them in singleplayer. Hotseat is great, because it allows you to save it. COnstant server (aka minecraft) is terrible. The only servers in minecraft where any cooperation happens is the ones where you can lock down the buildings from being destroyed, and that negates the need of "cooperate or crime will spill" that simcity 5 has. For "lnog builder types" multiplayer is the addon option for those few people that want to try it. its not a primary feature that sim city 5 wants to make it.
Yeah, so you confirm that this was a failure on the developement part to focus on multiplayer aspect isntead of making ti a singlepalyer. yes they are different builds, but this is taking a singlepalyer build and showing it into multiplayer the way thier doing it.
P.S. 7 hour settler matches were fun. though playing civilization 4 on marathon and huge map can get tediuos. we played for a week and still havent finished it. thats over 50 hours for one match. we still dont regret that
and thats becasue it was a hotseat, so we were doing more than gaming.
