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univbee
Jun 3, 2004




:siren: :siren: THERE'S AN OFFLINE PATCH! DOES IT BREAK EVERYTHING? OF COURSE! :siren: :siren:

:siren: THE MAC VERSION IS OUT BUT IS "TOTALLY UNPLAYABLE" :siren:

:siren: Many goons who have purchased this game have regretted doing so. There are still many game-breaking bugs after close to 3 months, and Maxis and EA have been mistreating people in support tickets who are just trying to get their $60 worth. :siren:

:siren: This game shouldn't even be purchased at a heavy discount or played ironically, as this will still put money in EA's pockets and send them a message that treating customers this way is an effective business model. :siren:


Metacritic 64*/100, User average 2.0 (as of August 29th 2013)
* - Some reviews later revised their scores to lower figures due to server problems post-launch (the reviewers were playing on basically empty servers) but Metacritic doesn't adjust their scores for this.

(Photo from Destructoid)

An excellent recap on the PC version's launch in March:

Sydney Bottocks posted:

For anyone who's wandered into this thread and wondered if buying SimCity is a good idea, but can't be bothered to read a bunch of pages, let me give you a quick recap:

SimCity gets released to much hoopla after some preview videos and a very short and limited series of closed betas where people get enough time to whet their appetite but not much more.

The release is an absolute disaster because of EA's requirement that the game is "always online" (with the oft-repeated claim that being online is totally necessary because it will offload calculations that would otherwise just absolutely punish gamers' rigs, and absolutely not because it is a form of DRM. No siree bob, nuh uh no way no how); and yet amazingly enough EA, after resounding MMO successes like Warhammer Online and Star Wars: The Old Republic, just completely under-anticipated the need for actual game servers for people to play their "always online" game. This made the game completely unplayable for many people since they couldn't play it offline and they couldn't get onto a server. And even if they did get online, the server was as stable as a tower of Jell-O and would often kick people out or wipe their cities (the latter is still happening for many players).

Finally the server situation is stabilized enough for more people to get to grips with the game, which is revealed to be surprisingly shallow, requiring people to use numerous methods of gameplay that are actually counter-intuitive to city builder games. The game is rife with pathing issues, as vehicles will choose the shortest route every time, even if it's actually slower. Fire trucks and other emergency vehicles dispatch en masse to fires, with all trucks arriving to a single fire (even if other buildings elsewhere in the city are burning). All of this is before you even take into account that the game actually does not allow you to build a city the way you want (both due to the limit on city sizes and the fact that the "always online" "social" component actually forces people to build "specialized" cities instead of the usual traditional R/C/I mixture).

As people get to grips with all this, more enterprising gamers start to delve under the hood, in the hopes that they can find a way to mod the game for offline play (which they do after a fashion, and I believe it was subsequently denounced by EA/Maxis as a "hack" that could cause gamers to get banned). Many of the game's dirty little secrets are discovered: the "always online" component is literally two lines of code that ping the servers and kill the game if there is no response after a period of time. The highly-touted "agents" system is at least partly responsible for all the game's traffic congestion issues, as it merely sends agents to available tasks (houses, jobs, etc.) all at once, with every agent converging on the first place until it is full, then moving on down to the second, and so forth, with the result being that the game's Sims actually just go from random house to random job to another random house to another random job, repeat as necessary. This also has the hilarious unintended side effect of having uneducated Sims actually go work at the nuke power plant (which requires educated Sims), while educated Sims sit at home and lament their unemployment (at least, until the nuke power plant melts down and kills everyone). Speaking of unemployment, it is also discovered that the game actually fudges population numbers, so that the game will literally complain about unemployed Sims that do not even exist. I could go on about many of the game's other horribly broken features but I think you get the point. I should also add that many devs confirmed that a lot of the game's problems were intentional, either by omission or by the fact that many of the broken features were intentionally designed that way. One dev gave a talk where he actually said "you should always be asking 'what can I remove from this game?'"

Oh and it's also discovered that all the offline calculations EA/Maxis claim the game does to their servers is actually complete fiction and there is no actual need for the "always online" requirement beyond saving games in their server cloud. No calculations actually take place on EA's servers and the game is perfectly capable of running offline (apart from the previously mentioned saving of games).

During all this time, EA and Maxis delivered a fascinating example of How Not To Do PR, as they stubbornly refused to accept even a single shred of responsibility. Instead, EA/Maxis blamed everyone from the gamers (who overloaded their servers and don't understand their "vision" for the game) to the games industry media (for either being too negative towards the game, or for hyping it too much, I forget which), with particular bile reserved for the Consumerist. This is because EA managed to handily win their second "Worst Company in America" award in a row from the Consumerist. EA's Peter Moore then claims the reason they won this is because of angry conservatives voting against EA in the Consumerist's poll because of EA's LGBT-friendly policies. Either that or angry sports fans voting against EA in the same poll because they didn't like whatever player/athlete was featured on a given EA Sports game's box. I am not making this up.

Additionally, EA told people they could flat-out get hosed on a refund (even when, depending on the country, there were actually legal protections in place that mandated EA had to issue a refund). In some cases EA begrudgingly issued refunds, in other places people were either forced to seek refunds via the point of purchase for non-Origin-based purchases (Amazon in particular should be commended, as they took most people's requests for refunds cheerfully and quickly), or by issuing a charge-back thru their credit card provider/bank. Incensed by people actually wanting their money back for such a lovely game, EA ran around banning users and game key codes willy-nilly (many of the affected keys were ones issued via Amazon, which in several cases hosed over people who hadn't actually contacted Amazon for a refund). EA finally begrudgingly offered an olive branch to gamers in the form of a "free game". This offer consisted of a bunch of games that generally required paid DLC to play successfully, and Sim City 4. The "free games" were then subsequently highly discounted during a sale on Origin. Again, I am not making this poo poo up.

Oh and somewhere in there EA's CEO finally resigned, and I think one of the top guys at Maxis left. And throughout it all EA and Maxis just kept their heads buried right in the sand, issuing increasingly :smug: and condescending press releases about how "millions of people" were still playing SimCity even after it became apparent that they had a huge failure on their hands. After a while, EA/Maxis seemingly went silent and apart from the announcement of the much-vaunted 2.0 patch (which will arrive next Tuesday and looks to be completely underwhelming), they have finally figured out that it's best to keep mum, since every time they open their mouths they have to extract a football team's worth of feet from it.

If you managed to slog your way through all that text and still think SimCity is worth a buy, then by all means do so. I think you'd get more enjoyment out of just setting $60 (or whatever the game costs now, last I knew several US retailers had it at half-price or even possibly less than that) afire and roasting marshmallows over it, but to each their own. v:shobon:v

Patch notes

Note 1: since the game is always online you will always be playing with the most recent version with no possibility of downgrading.
Note 2: Despite what's stated in the patch notes, here's what someone on EA's forums had to say about the lack of truth in the patch notes:

quote:

Did anyone at headquarters patch this and try playing AT ALL? Every single issue is found within 20 minutes of play time. HOW DID THAT SLIP BY? Furthermore how could you calmly ask for feedback, knowing what a firestorm (pun intended) would end up here?

How are your paid testers playing? Could they post a guide? Because apparently they love this game, and told you the patch was SOLID for release!

The game sucks, your patch sucks, your QA team sucks, your testers suck, and your programmers apparently never even bother testing their code. You may just want to fire everyone, hire the 3rd worlders you have working at the origin customer service chat, telling the shareholders how much you saved in operating expenses to achieve the same nongoals - and call it a day.

I hope you clowns go out of business and the franchise ends up in the hands of people who actually care about what SimCity is supposed to be - because THIS ISN'T IT.

Update 10/09/2013 - Update 7.5
Sending monetary gifts will now arrive with the correct amount sent.
Additional compatibility fixes for Mavericks (10.9)
Compatibility updates for Windows 8.1 support
Tuned the “Not enough freight producers” alert to display if there is a local freight consumer as opposed to regional freight consumer
Using Mac shortcuts that change application focus during loading will no longer display SimCity in a window when switching back to game

The rest of this OP is mostly Extra Noise's excellent original OP with some changes.

:siren: Join #simcity on irc.synirc.net to play cities with other goons! :siren:

:siren: Use this spreadsheet to organize with other goons for region play! :siren:

:frogsiren: Some handy charts and stuff everyone should read! :frogsiren:

:siren: Please read the FAQ below. If you ask "How do I upgrade roads?" one more time, I'm going to start hitting the report button. :siren:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMF0ZprCH2g


A new SimCity has been released!

Yes, actually developed by Maxis.

Yes, by quite a few of the same people who made the previous SimCity titles.

But it's not SimCity 5; it's a reboot of the franchise that's more like a twenty-four year successor to the original 1989 SimCity than it is a direct successor to 2003's SimCity 4.

SimCity throws you into a game where you are mayor of a city (non-existent when you start) and you're tasked with building it from the ground up. Create jobs, build a transportation network, lay down neighborhoods for families, and then improve the quality of life for your Sims – the virtual inhabitants of your city – so that they'll continue to keep you in office. On top of this you'll need to balance a budget, find and resell resources to other players, and continue to expand your city's boundaries and improve services offered.


A History of the Franchise

SimCity 4 was released in 2003 and was met with critical acclaim but suffered in sales in the wake of the success that was The Sims. A follow-up title, SimCity Societies (developed by another studio), was released in 2007 but was a commercial flop, and Maxis was restructured and refocused to work almost exclusively on TheSims 2 expansions and TheSims 3 and its later expansions. By 2009, it was believed we may never see another true SimCity title.

The final nail in the coffin was Cities XL which was praised as a successor and then became a disaster (that certainly had some redeeming qualities, but not enough) and was a certain sign that EA would never sign off on another city building simulator because there was no market for them. But apparently the gears were already at work inside of Maxis, who was developing a new game engine called GlassBox that they anticipated to use to redevelop some of their older titles. Their first project? SimCity.


Features people are raving about!

- There are curved roads.

- Each region is multiplayer, allowing you to build cities and trade resources with your friends.

- There is a global market, allowing your cities that specialize in certain resources to distribute those resources to other cities/players for cash.

- Charts/graphs have been replaced in the game with stylized "Infographic" data charts overlayed on the city itself.

- Certain buildings are modular and can be expanded upon to affect the areas of the cities they are placed in differently. These include public buildings, civic buildings, and parks, among others.

- Cars/Sims in the game are persistent Agents and will go about their daily lives instead of fading in and out when they reach a destination. Each Sim that you see represents someone in the city, so if they're late for work (stuck in traffic), the building they work in will produce less and can cause it to shut down. They are all individually named, too!

- The "Agent" system assigns sims their daily housing and working environment. Agents are sent from buildings to meet requirements from other buildings.

- Buildings on-screen will affect the background music to give you an idea a particular area is doing.

- There are mass transit options such as busses, trams, and trains. Rumor has it that more will be added in the future.

- There are no more zone density types. Zones will grow in density as they meet certain conditions including demand and land value. You can limit growth based on road types.


Features people are raving-mad about!

- Forced online connection in order to play the game.

- Cities are saved to the server. There are no local saves. You cannot save, destroy your city with disasters, and then reload from the save.

- Cities are limited to roughly 2 square kilometers. This is about the same size as a "Medium" city in SimCity 4. There are reports that Maxis is looking to expand this in the future, but no information has been released yet with details.

- Modding is unofficially supported. More details to come as people crack open the game.

- There is no terraforming.

- There are no custom regions.

- Regions feature lots of "empty" space between cities, which at this time are big grassy plains. There are auto-generated highways that run between the cities that you cannot control.

- Tilt-shift mode. (I kind of like it.)

- Buildings situated along curved roads are not "wall-to-wall". Buildings are not dynamically shaped, leaving some dead-space between buildings. Right now that dead-space is all patchy grass, but fans are hoping there is a Cities XL-style system to plop in plazas, parking lots, etc.


Frequently Asked Questions

When does the game come out?
It is now available worldwide; it was made available on March 5, 2013 (US), March 7 worldwide, and March 8 (UK) for PC. Mac will be available soon (Spring 2013). You are required to use Origin to download and play.

I'm concerned about city size. They seem so small! Will city sizes be increased?
Maxis has mentioned a few times that there may be long-term plans to increase the borders of cities, but has them purposefully limited to decrease simulator workload and increase the need for city specializations.

How many cities are there per region?
Regions have between two and sixteen city plots, plus a handful of "Great Works" locations. You can play in up to 10 regions at a time.

Are there seasons?
Yes! Just no snow in winter. Time works differently in this game, based on "hours" that pass during the day that slowly advance each month and year. The game will cycle through each season, however, when it gets to the appropriate month.

Do I have to play the tutorial over again?
You don't. Click on the menu in game and select Main Menu. From there you can play normally.

Do I have to bulldoze all of my roads to upgrade them?
No! There is a small button under the road placement type buttons that allows for you to "Upgrade Roads" by clicking on them and selecting which upgrade or downgrade option you would like.

How do I zone entire blocks without dragging around the edge?
Hold down CTRL and it will "fill in" the block with the selected zone.

Why does transferring simoleans seem to take so long?
It's agent based: A sim gets in their car, suitcase full of money in-hand, and drives to the neighboring city. It can take awhile if you have traffic problems.

I'm being asked to build a Trade Depot. Where are city specialization buildings?
There is a small button (shield icon) in the lower left corner of the user interface that allows you to build city specializations, including the Trade Depot (and Casinos or whatever).

How are Sims named? Can I name my own?
You can't name your own, unfortunately. You can import them, somehow, from TheSims 3 through some trick of magic that I don't fully understand. I believe it involves sacrificing a goat. The names you see in the game are randomly generated from the 1,000 most popular first and last names in the U.S.

How do I disable the blurry effect (Tilt-Shift effect)?
To disable tilt-shift (or at least turn it down), check out the graphics options and select "Less" under the drop-down menu.

How do I change the color of my game? Everything is too bright and colorful and I hate prettiness. (Also maybe I'm colorblind.)
The options to change the camera "filters" are located under the game settings. It's a big drop-down list that includes a bunch of different filters to view your cities in. I prefer "Warmer". There are options for individuals with colorblindness as well, so they can view the information on the screen.

How do I restart my city?
Admit defeat and get the bulldozer warmed up: There's no reset.

I don't really care about cities, but I like zombies. Are there zombies?
One of the disasters is a simulated zombie outbreak that will spread from sim to sim, forcing your police force to kill the infected before it gets out of hand and destroys your entire population.

Can I reticulate splines?
This is actually the first game in the entire series that allows you to do it, because all the roads are real splines now. Reticulate away!

quote:

A park. I blame a park for a city of dead, irradiated, burnt sims.

Here's the story:

My city was doing nicely, earning a decent profit and had good service coverage. High density buildings had started sprouting up in my core downtown area after upgrading my roads, but they werent a huge burden to the city and I was handling things. I built a nuclear power plant and, now supplying the region with lots of power, took down my old windmill. The city was well educated and running smoothly.

I decided that downtown could use a little urban renewal, so I built a plaza.

Immediately the new high-wealth skyscrapers started to spring up. It halfed my total population, as everyone who was living in the buildings that were just there were kicked out in the name of new development. But that was where all the smart sims lived!

The nuclear plant immediately started issuing warnings of a lack of educated workers, and that's when things got hairy. The plant melted down. A wave of radiation washed over my city, killing hundreds.

With the power now out, and no money for a backup, the clinics filled up and then shut down. The schools shut down. Police. The fire departments.

Sims, homeless and without jobs because their factories and offices were closed, began turning to crime. Crime led to arsons. And that's when the great fire broke out, consuming what was left of the city that wasn't completely sick and decayed.

In less than a year, the city went from a thriving metropolis to a burned crater, glowing and full of criminals and fires.

All because of a park.

xzzy posted:

Had a cozy little town going, but the main avenue was getting a lot of traffic backed up during the morning and evening commutes. City was perfectly stable, I was making enough money to experiment with some upgrades and was generally having fun exploring the game. Without thinking I upgraded the avenue. and suddenly a bunch of medium density buildings converted themselves into an unbroken row of skyscrapers. They looked like the magnificent mile in Chicago.

All the sudden I had thousands of unfilled jobs and I wasn't making money any more because the vacant towers weren't generating any taxes. After a few minutes my industrial sector also got pissed off because no one was accepting their freight and then they started shutting down.

Worst part was it didn't do jack poo poo to help the traffic problems.

Badfinger posted:

Making the highway right through town also be a major artery to get to places IN town is horribly dicking me over. Traffic is terrible and it's causing people to miss work, which is causing them to be homeless, which is causing buildings to be abandoned, which is causing crime, which is causing me to spend more money on police infrastructure (but I can't spend it on the really fancy police station because I can't afford it, so I'm band-aiding it over with the cheaper ones which end up costing more overall), but there are homeless people so I'm losing out anyway because I'm not getting enough tax revenue, but the traffic is still so loving bad that my police cars and fire trucks are in horrible traffic jams and can't stop the crimes (example crime: arson). Traffic so bad that the common cry of "why aren't people pulling over? Why aren't the emergency response services using the unused lanes?!" have no merit to me because all the lanes are jammed for HOURS. And guess what? When the skyscraper on the avenue is the one that's catching fire, then the fire trucks are the ones causing the traffic jams. Hooray for me.

quote:

My jerk friend built a nuclear power plant in a neighbouring city but refused to educate workers enough to properly run it. In essence, he had elementary school educated adults running a nuclear reactor. It eventually melted down when they mistook a control button for a soother, and the radiation cloud is going to arrive in my city soon. When I found out this happened, a tornado appeared in my wealthy downtown core and took out about a thousand people. Welp.

Mandalay posted:

To alleviate traffic congestion, I added an extensive streetcar fleet running a perimeter loop around my city, as well as one spur through the central avenue that runs from the highway to the coast. To help circulation, I also added an avenue on the edge as well.

My incoming traffic backed up to the next city over. You know all that green space people are complaining about as empty? Nope. Full of cars. Outgoing traffic was paralyzed too.

Then a taxi stopped on the side of the main avenue for days. And my oil tanker got stuck behind that. My city ran out of power due to lack of oil and negative tailspin bankruptcy hoooo

quote:

I finally got a sweet processor/computer/television industry going, when a giant lizard monster rampages through my nuclear power plant and renders the city uninhabitable due to radiation. All my high-wealth, high-education, high-density stuff turned to mud huts instantly. There's nobody around smart enough to work in my high-tech industry, and nobody even smart enough to recycle things so that I can produce more plastic and alloy for my industry anyway.

BULBASAUR posted:

Remember my hilarious soviet dystopia of coal, oil, zero social services? Monday night I made a mistake. After watching an alarmingly large part of my population die in the streets from pollution I built a school and a clinic. BIG mistake. Suddenly the plebs got dangerous thoughts and started to DEMAND things from the people's mayorship of lowtaxastan. Riots broke out. People packed up and left the city.

I vowed to demolish the troublesome school and clinic when I got home.

Instead I built more schools, clinics, and a ton of parks. My population started to decline even more so I built even more parks and social services before rezoning everything into heavy. The net result basically looks like this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxq7U0oNuCE

:siren: This thread contains much of the following. You have been warned.

univbee fucked around with this message at 14:38 on Mar 20, 2014

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Eric the Mauve
May 8, 2012

Making you happy for a buck since 199X
Posting this here because it really is a perfect summary of what happened with this game and deserves to be in the OP or second post:

Sydney Bottocks posted:

For anyone who's wandered into this thread and wondered if buying SimCity is a good idea, but can't be bothered to read a bunch of pages, let me give you a quick recap:

SimCity gets released to much hoopla after some preview videos and a very short and limited series of closed betas where people get enough time to whet their appetite but not much more.

The release is an absolute disaster because of EA's requirement that the game is "always online" (with the oft-repeated claim that being online is totally necessary because it will offload calculations that would otherwise just absolutely punish gamers' rigs, and absolutely not because it is a form of DRM. No siree bob, nuh uh no way no how); and yet amazingly enough EA, after resounding MMO successes like Warhammer Online and Star Wars: The Old Republic, just completely under-anticipated the need for actual game servers for people to play their "always online" game. This made the game completely unplayable for many people since they couldn't play it offline and they couldn't get onto a server. And even if they did get online, the server was as stable as a tower of Jell-O and would often kick people out or wipe their cities (the latter is still happening for many players).

Finally the server situation is stabilized enough for more people to get to grips with the game, which is revealed to be surprisingly shallow, requiring people to use numerous methods of gameplay that are actually counter-intuitive to city builder games. The game is rife with pathing issues, as vehicles will choose the shortest route every time, even if it's actually slower. Fire trucks and other emergency vehicles dispatch en masse to fires, with all trucks arriving to a single fire (even if other buildings elsewhere in the city are burning). All of this is before you even take into account that the game actually does not allow you to build a city the way you want (both due to the limit on city sizes and the fact that the "always online" "social" component actually forces people to build "specialized" cities instead of the usual traditional R/C/I mixture).

As people get to grips with all this, more enterprising gamers start to delve under the hood, in the hopes that they can find a way to mod the game for offline play (which they do after a fashion, and I believe it was subsequently denounced by EA/Maxis as a "hack" that could cause gamers to get banned). Many of the game's dirty little secrets are discovered: the "always online" component is literally two lines of code that ping the servers and kill the game if there is no response after a period of time. The highly-touted "agents" system is at least partly responsible for all the game's traffic congestion issues, as it merely sends agents to available tasks (houses, jobs, etc.) all at once, with every agent converging on the first place until it is full, then moving on down to the second, and so forth, with the result being that the game's Sims actually just go from random house to random job to another random house to another random job, repeat as necessary. This also has the hilarious unintended side effect of having uneducated Sims actually go work at the nuke power plant (which requires educated Sims), while educated Sims sit at home and lament their unemployment (at least, until the nuke power plant melts down and kills everyone). Speaking of unemployment, it is also discovered that the game actually fudges population numbers, so that the game will literally complain about unemployed Sims that do not even exist. I could go on about many of the game's other horribly broken features but I think you get the point. I should also add that many devs confirmed that a lot of the game's problems were intentional, either by omission or by the fact that many of the broken features were intentionally designed that way. One dev gave a talk where he actually said "you should always be asking 'what can I remove from this game?'"

Oh and it's also discovered that all the offline calculations EA/Maxis claim the game does to their servers is actually complete fiction and there is no actual need for the "always online" requirement beyond saving games in their server cloud. No calculations actually take place on EA's servers and the game is perfectly capable of running offline (apart from the previously mentioned saving of games).

During all this time, EA and Maxis delivered a fascinating example of How Not To Do PR, as they stubbornly refused to accept even a single shred of responsibility. Instead, EA/Maxis blamed everyone from the gamers (who overloaded their servers and don't understand their "vision" for the game) to the games industry media (for either being too negative towards the game, or for hyping it too much, I forget which), with particular bile reserved for the Consumerist. This is because EA managed to handily win their second "Worst Company in America" award in a row from the Consumerist. EA's Peter Moore then claims the reason they won this is because of angry conservatives voting against EA in the Consumerist's poll because of EA's LGBT-friendly policies. Either that or angry sports fans voting against EA in the same poll because they didn't like whatever player/athlete was featured on a given EA Sports game's box. I am not making this up.

Additionally, EA told people they could flat-out get hosed on a refund (even when, depending on the country, there were actually legal protections in place that mandated EA had to issue a refund). In some cases EA begrudgingly issued refunds, in other places people were either forced to seek refunds via the point of purchase for non-Origin-based purchases (Amazon in particular should be commended, as they took most people's requests for refunds cheerfully and quickly), or by issuing a charge-back thru their credit card provider/bank. Incensed by people actually wanting their money back for such a lovely game, EA ran around banning users and game key codes willy-nilly (many of the affected keys were ones issued via Amazon, which in several cases hosed over people who hadn't actually contacted Amazon for a refund). EA finally begrudgingly offered an olive branch to gamers in the form of a "free game". This offer consisted of a bunch of games that generally required paid DLC to play successfully, and Sim City 4. The "free games" were then subsequently highly discounted during a sale on Origin. Again, I am not making this poo poo up.

Oh and somewhere in there EA's CEO finally resigned, and I think one of the top guys at Maxis left. And throughout it all EA and Maxis just kept their heads buried right in the sand, issuing increasingly :smug: and condescending press releases about how "millions of people" were still playing SimCity even after it became apparent that they had a huge failure on their hands. After a while, EA/Maxis seemingly went silent and apart from the announcement of the much-vaunted 2.0 patch (which will arrive next Tuesday and looks to be completely underwhelming), they have finally figured out that it's best to keep mum, since every time they open their mouths they have to extract a football team's worth of feet from it.

If you managed to slog your way through all that text and still think SimCity is worth a buy, then by all means do so. I think you'd get more enjoyment out of just setting $60 (or whatever the game costs now, last I knew several US retailers had it at half-price or even possibly less than that) afire and roasting marshmallows over it, but to each their own. v:shobon:v

Eric the Mauve fucked around with this message at 19:04 on May 1, 2013

mutata
Mar 1, 2003

Poor ExtraNoise about had an emotional breakdown over starting a stupid thread in the Games forum, that's how bad we all and this game are...

tao of lmao
Oct 9, 2005

I'm still here as token "kinda like the game" guy. Was in the middle of typing up a post for the last thread when it closed.

As someone who has over 150 hours logged in this game and enjoyed it, PLEASE DO NOT BUY THIS GAME. Especially if you're the type to get mad about games. This game is borked and it will never be fixed. Modders have already given up and EA clearly doesn't give a poo poo to fix anything.

Literal Hamster
Mar 11, 2012

YOSPOS
What happened to the whole modding thing anyways? I thought Glassbox was supposed to be some ultra-moddable swiss army knife of an engine.

I guess somewhere along the line, a suit at EA realized that if modders were making their own buildings and maps, you couldn't charge $15 for each one. Which would be hilarious, because the only reason SC4 is still so active and popular to this day is because of the extensive modding support it has.

mutata
Mar 1, 2003

Modding was only ever mentioned to quell the rage-fires of angry fans prerelease. In reality, as soon as "always online" was agreed on in design meetings, that threw any possibility of modding directly out the window.

Name Change
Oct 9, 2005


Eric the Mauve posted:

Posting this here because it really is a perfect summary of what happened with this game and deserves to be in the OP or second post:

See, at first I thought all this constant hullabaloo in my newsfeeds was simply to do with the servers crashing for the first few days. Which more or less seems to happen to every AAA game that requires an internet connection anymore. It really seemed like the typical thing where gamers make a huge fuss over mostly nothing, such as that recent time where everyone pre-ordered Colonial Marines without reading reviews and now think that they can sue SEGA for releasing gameplay videos. (I predict that getting Dikembe Mutumbo'd out of court pretty quickly).

Now we get down to:

-SimCity is not a AAA game at all
-Does nothing with its internet gameplay components except make you wish there were none at all
-Continues to have server problems

Coincidentally, I dropped $5 on Spore the other day, that other infamously underwhelming Maxis game ($5 is a fair price and the first time I had ever seen it on sale in five years). For the first two days after the Steam sale, the servers were down.

Name Change fucked around with this message at 20:06 on May 1, 2013

Baloogan
Dec 5, 2004
Fun Shoe
Just want to resurrect my post from the previous thread. I was angry. I was angry about videogames.



quote:

Hold your horses there Mr. "ExtraNoise". Please note that I didn't say "After maxis was purchased by EA they were making poo poo games".

I liked Simcity 4. I didn't like spore or the sims. I don't think sim city 4 is a good enough game to balance out the others, especially spore.

I used to love maxis. Playing simearth (especially reading the manual) as a kid got me interested in atmospheric and environmental sciences. I currently work in environmental sciences. In a way early maxis games shaped the person I am today. I loved that game and today I still do. It introduced me to the idea of 'systems' and 'systems within systems'.

Simcity 2000, I loved this game. I remember my parents promised to buy this game for me about a month before we got it and all I did all day was draw up cities on paper. We also got the sim city 2000 construction kit program too.

Simisle and Simfarm were pretty fun too! They were systems games.

Simcopter was a really fun game, I loved flying around my cities and I loved the idea of a ... sandbox adventure game; where missions would just appear.

Then finally streets of sim city. Alien abductions and old grandmothers attaching machine guns to thier car to go do something about the aliens? AND I could drive around my own cities? AND set up jumps in Sim city 2000 contstruction kit? !!!!!

Finally maxis is purchased by EA and what do we get? The Sims, spore and progressively worse sim cities culminating in this steaming pile of poo poo.

Their brand is dead to me.
Will Wright is dead to me.

So yes, before 1997 Maxis was magnificent. After 1997 with ONE exception they have been making poo poo games. Games with no depth to them. Games for people who don't want to think too hard.

Games for people like you.

ExtraNoise
Apr 11, 2007

Baloogan posted:

Just want to resurrect my post from the previous thread. I was angry. I was angry about videogames.

Jesus Christ. Do you still think this or did you read my reply?

Jamesman
Nov 19, 2004

"First off, let me start by saying curly light blond hair does not suit Hyomin at all. Furthermore,"
Fun Shoe

OneThousandMonkeys posted:

such as that recent time where everyone pre-ordered Colonial Marines without reading reviews and now think that they can sue SEGA for releasing gameplay videos. (I predict that getting Dikembe Mutumbo'd out of court pretty quickly).

Hopefully not to get on a derail, but what was demonstrated and advertised for that game was extremely different from what was released and sold to consumers. False advertising is a real thing and a real lawsuit can be made about it.

Back to Sim City... hahahahahahahaha gently caress I can't believe how bad this poo poo got. I actually considered getting it before it was released, because I hadn't played a Sim City game since Sim City 2000 (which I never liked), and thought it might be nice to get on it. I'm very, very happy I did not. I'll stick with the original for SNES. At least there you get to chillax with Mr. Wright and get sweet rewards for your city growing.

Moongrave
Jun 19, 2004

Finally Living Rent Free
It would be cool to have a pre-to-post launch timeline, I know someone did one in the old thread a while ago stating all the poo poo that's happened/what EZ/Maxis has said.

Just, you know, tho have it all out there so people know just how bad the game, and it's developers/paymasters actually are at both making games and PR.

Beamed
Nov 26, 2010

Then you have a responsibility that no man has ever faced. You have your fear which could become reality, and you have Godzilla, which is reality.


The FAQ says the game is fun despite the earlier warnings. So, well: is it?

Moongrave
Jun 19, 2004

Finally Living Rent Free

Beamed posted:

The FAQ says the game is fun despite the earlier warnings. So, well: is it?

He didn't change the OP since the launch day thread for the FAQ

So, no.

Baloogan
Dec 5, 2004
Fun Shoe

Beamed posted:

The FAQ says the game is fun despite the earlier warnings. So, well: is it?

The guy who made the last op has recanted his sins.

Kalli
Jun 2, 2001



Beamed posted:

The FAQ says the game is fun despite the earlier warnings. So, well: is it?

For about ~10 hours on average I'd say. It's a very shallow game with many non-functional specialities and buildings sadly. The rending of garments posters go through to declare it the worst thing ever is beyond melodramatic, but hey, that's nothing new.

The release stuff is nonsense at this point to a prospective buyer (beyond general EA whinging), and since I had skipped that stage as well, felt the game was deserving of at least a serious patch before rendering verdict. It's had a patch and it was awful. If they patch it further and release solid content? Sure, check back, otherwise, give it a pass, and just don't expect that to actually happen.

Broken Loose
Dec 25, 2002

PROGRAM
A > - - -
LR > > - -
LL > - - -

Beamed posted:

The FAQ says the game is fun despite the earlier warnings. So, well: is it?

NO.

Beamed
Nov 26, 2010

Then you have a responsibility that no man has ever faced. You have your fear which could become reality, and you have Godzilla, which is reality.


Back to the best Simcity then: 3000 Millenium Edition.

That's right, cue the haters :colbert:

ExtraNoise
Apr 11, 2007

Beamed posted:

Back to the best Simcity then: 3000 Millenium Edition.

That's right, cue the haters :colbert:

There's no reason to hate that game, it's wonderful. My name is in the Special Thanks credits. :smug:

Chafey
Jun 14, 2005
It's like I'd almost rather be playing Simcity Societies than this mess.

OH YEAH I have to reinstall Origin basically every time I want to play one of my games now, otherwise I get a ORIGIN STOPPED RESPONDING error, though this is likely just because I have an equally valueless piece of windows 8 software. Why is everything so bad?

univbee
Jun 3, 2004




Beamed posted:

The FAQ says the game is fun despite the earlier warnings. So, well: is it?

I just edited the OP and combined two related questions to avoid this confusion.

Sydney Bottocks
Oct 15, 2004
Probation
Can't post for 61 days!
I'd just like to say that I'm very proud and humbled to have my "SimCity recap" quoted in both the OP and the second post this time around. If it helps prevent only a single innocent person from squandering their hard-earned money, it'll have been worth it. :patriot:

KnifeWrench
May 25, 2007

Practical and safe.

Bleak Gremlin

Beamed posted:

The FAQ says the game is fun despite the earlier warnings. So, well: is it?

You will play any game until you no longer enjoy it. That leaves many of us in the position where we see only flaws. For what it's worth, I did have a good bit of fun with the game at first. I don't think it was ever $60 worth of fun, and I think a lot of it was born of naivety -- I hadn't yet bumped up against the limitations of the shallow gameplay. If I'd known then what I know now, it might not have ever been fun; you can't always put that genie back in the bottle.

Yodzilla
Apr 29, 2005

Now who looks even dumber?

Beef Witch
Simcity is second the most entertaining game you never have to play. Less than EVE Online but more than Aliens: Colonial Marines.

Ugly In The Morning
Jul 1, 2010
Pillbug

Beamed posted:

Back to the best Simcity then: 3000 Millenium Edition.

That's right, cue the haters :colbert:

God I want that on Steam or GoG. I think I've spent more time on that one than I have on any other SC game. It's so much fun to just stare at it for a while, and the region stuff is a lot less involved than 4's/this unholy abominations region systems are.

Eric the Mauve
May 8, 2012

Making you happy for a buck since 199X
If SimCity 3000 Unlimited went on Steam right now for $30 I would not hesitate for a second to buy it. After all these years I still vacillate on whether that or SC4 is my favorite and play both as my moods change.

Sydney Bottocks
Oct 15, 2004
Probation
Can't post for 61 days!

Yodzilla posted:

Simcity is second the most entertaining game you never have to play. Less than EVE Online but more than Aliens: Colonial Marines.

Exactly, there have been absolute tons of enjoyment gleaned out of the previous thread, and I never spent one dime on it. :)

In all seriousness, the game to me stopped having even the potential for being fun when it was revealed that a lot of the problems people were having were not just results of sloppy code, but actual game design decisions and steps taken to make the game seem deeper than it actually was. Once I heard about how the game fudged the population numbers (so that the game will complain about unemployed Sims that don't even exist), I knew then that any fun to be gained from it was going to be fleeting at best.

rawdog pozfail
Jan 2, 2006

by Ralp
I purchased the game from Amazon on March 18th. Today I used their official return page thing to write an email saying "I wasn't able to play at launch do to server issues and my first region has said "currently unplayable at this time" for the last four weeks. I've been waiting for a fix that hasn't come and have decided it isn't worth it any longer, is there any way I can still get a refund?"

A few hours later..

Amazon posted:

I'm sorry for the inconvenience caused in this regard. This is truly something which we would never like our customers to experience. I’d be happy to help you.

As a standard policy, Games, Game Items, and Software Downloads are not returnable after purchase. However, because of the circumstances, I've made a one-time exception and issued a refund in the amount of $65.15.

Your refund should be completed within the next 2-3 business days and will be applied to the payment method used for the original purchase.

:dance::slick::toot: Amazon hates Sim City too!

rawdog pozfail fucked around with this message at 22:54 on May 1, 2013

Lucy Heartfilia
May 31, 2012


I like making fun of this bad game and its imcompetent devs. And I'm sure there are still plenty of things to laugh about to be expected in the near future.

Jamesman
Nov 19, 2004

"First off, let me start by saying curly light blond hair does not suit Hyomin at all. Furthermore,"
Fun Shoe

Lucy Heartfilia posted:

I like making fun of this bad game and its imcompetent devs. And I'm sure there are still plenty of things to laugh about to be expected in the near future.

That is why Star Wars Galaxies is my favorite game of all time.

...of SCIENCE!
Apr 26, 2008

by Fluffdaddy
Eh, I'll still probably grab it on a Steam sale.

AnoMouse
Feb 13, 2012
Sorry if this has been answered, but

Sydney Bottocks posted:

One dev gave a talk where he actually said "you should always be asking 'what can I remove from this game?'"

There has to be some context to this. No game designer could be this stupid.

3 Tablets Daily
Jun 7, 2006

by Cyrano4747

Sydney Bottocks posted:

Exactly, there have been absolute tons of enjoyment gleaned out of the previous thread, and I never spent one dime on it. :)

In all seriousness, the game to me stopped having even the potential for being fun when it was revealed that a lot of the problems people were having were not just results of sloppy code, but actual game design decisions and steps taken to make the game seem deeper than it actually was. Once I heard about how the game fudged the population numbers (so that the game will complain about unemployed Sims that don't even exist), I knew then that any fun to be gained from it was going to be fleeting at best.

How does the game fudge population numbers so that the game will complain about unemployment?

Sindai
Jan 24, 2007
i want to achieve immortality through not dying

AnoMouse posted:

Sorry if this has been answered, but

There has to be some context to this. No game designer could be this stupid.
That doesn't really need context, it's a basic design principle. It's bad to fill a game (or software in general) full of pointless, confusing, or redundant features. It both wastes development time and decreases the quality of the final product.

Of course, it's possible to go too far.

Sindai fucked around with this message at 23:35 on May 1, 2013

mutata
Mar 1, 2003

AnoMouse posted:

Sorry if this has been answered, but


There has to be some context to this. No game designer could be this stupid.

Scoping a game down to a solid, polished set of core mechanics and systems is generally good design. Look up the term feature creep for more info. I haven't watched the guy's presentation, but given the fact that he was talking to a room full of developers at a game developers' conference leads me to believe that this is what he was talking about. Out of context, though, people are enjoying making him out to be the sole force behind all of simcity's issues, which is fun, but silly.

Broken Loose
Dec 25, 2002

PROGRAM
A > - - -
LR > > - -
LL > - - -

3 Tablets Daily posted:

How does the game fudge population numbers so that the game will complain about unemployment?

There is literally a line of code that's called "GetFudgedPopulation" that inflates your numbers.

pre:
simcity.GetFudgedPopulation = function (a) {
    a = "undefined" !== typeof a ? a : simcity.gGlobalUIHandler.mLastPopulation;
    if (500 >= a)
        return a;
    if (40845 < a)
        return Math.floor(8.25 * a);
    a = Math.pow(a - 500, 1.2) + 500;
    return Math.floor(a)
};
So unless you have 499 or fewer citizens, the agents ingame aren't actually representative of your population.

AnoMouse posted:

Sorry if this has been answered, but


There has to be some context to this. No game designer could be this stupid.

Here is the context. Long story short: they removed a ton of features (like skyscrapers floors counting as their own units), then started cutting corners (pedestrians teleport to their destinations instead of walking), then just started chopping away at core elements (drastically reducing city size) because the people making the game didn't understand game balance or play simulation games at all.


And before trolls start coming in and being contrarian about city size, modders had already found the "increase city plot size" DLC within the game within a week of release. They enabled it and found that it didn't impact performance much if at all (Residential-only cities generate ludicriously high populations already).

Broken Loose fucked around with this message at 23:44 on May 1, 2013

corn in the bible
Jun 5, 2004

Oh no oh god it's all true!
The bizarre thing about the population fudging is that it wouldn't be a big deal if the amount of workers available/required was similarly fudged. What I mean is, at the moment you can look and see you have 50k population and think that means you need to have 50k jobs, when what it means is you need to have far, far fewer. This is nonsensical.

tao of lmao
Oct 9, 2005

Sydney Bottocks posted:

so that the game will complain about unemployed Sims that don't even exist

This isn't true. The overall population numbers are fudged, but the real numbers are in the "details" section of the population window. Only time the game will complain about jobless problems are when the real numbers say so.

In fact, the RCI is so loving broken, you should only be using the population details window for any zoning decisions.

KnifeWrench
May 25, 2007

Practical and safe.

Bleak Gremlin

...of SCIENCE! posted:

Eh, I'll still probably grab it on a Steam sale.

Do EA games even make it to Steam anymore?

Ugly In The Morning
Jul 1, 2010
Pillbug

KnifeWrench posted:

Do EA games even make it to Steam anymore?

Some do, some don't. Crysis 2 is on, the Sims stuff is on, I think, but it's missing games like Battlefield 3 and Mass Effect 3. It's kind of a crapshoot.

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Simone Poodoin
Jun 26, 2003

Che storia figata, ragazzo!



Holy Calamity! posted:

I purchased the game from Amazon on March 18th. Today I used their official return page thing to write an email saying "I wasn't able to play at launch do to server issues and my first region has said "currently unplayable at this time" for the last four weeks. I've been waiting for a fix that hasn't come and have decided it isn't worth it any longer, is there any way I can still get a refund?"

A few hours later..


:dance::slick::toot: Amazon hates Sim City too!

Does anyone know if Amazon are taking the loss for this? If not I will request a refund too.

  • Locked thread