Y'know, I was looking forward to Sim City, or Sim City 5, or Sim City 2013 or whatever they could have called it. The whole always on thing pisses me off severely, though.
So, what I did, just in my spare, private time over the past Easter weekend, was to dig out Sim City 4. I installed it... wow, that was fast. I booted it up... wow, that was fast. Wow, that's a pretty low resolution for the FMV bit. I set up a random little city, and... all of a sudden... WHAT? WHY DO I HAVE TO CONNECT TO EA? WHAT IS THIS? WHY ARE THEY... HOW DID THEY? DID I NOT BLOCK ONLINE ACCESS?
And then I remembered... oh, this feature that lets me connect my various cities to each other, to sell my goods, get rid of my trash, let my Sims find jobs elsewhere... that's no online shenanigan thing at all. It's an offline feature that lets me use little blackboxes of presumably smart code that, using mostly statistical data about each of my cities, generates, at worst, nothing at all, at best some cool productive synergies that feel good. Most of the time, it did not really have much of an impact on me.
Why anyone would want to make this the one must-have feature eludes me and my at times overabundant imagination. It's a nice-to-have you get shoved in your face in Sim City 4. In Sim City 2013, which is Sim City 5 but goes by the name of Sim City, it's an annoying bit of always-on DRM that completely ruined it for me.
I'd like to play a Sim City with fancy new graphics. Not at the cost of seeing one of my favourite franchises come to feel like one of those soul-sucking black hole time sinks of friendface games or other micro transaction vehicles that simply are not worth the effort, ever.
I will not buy Sim City (5, 2013) as long as the always-online bit cannot be circumvented properly. Either by an aftermarket patch from EA/Maxis, or by other means. It sucks, but it's the way they chose to play war against their own faithful clients. I find that to be quite offensive.