Simcity (2013): You shouldn't purchase this game! YOU WILL REGRET THIS!

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Simcity (2013): You shouldn't purchase this game! YOU WILL REGRET THIS!

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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 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. vv

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

# ¿ May 1, 2013 19:01

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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 10:54

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.

# ¿ May 1, 2013 22:00

Eric the Mauve: May 8, 2012; Making you happy for a buck since 199X

Other than the fact cities don't have resources and if I wanted to play a resource trading game I'd play Civilization, the resources thing is a very cool idea.

That's a small thing really, but it's a perfect example, one of many, of what went wrong with this game conceptually. I don't give a poo poo about resources. I just want to build a loving city.

# ¿ May 2, 2013 19:54

Eric the Mauve: May 8, 2012; Making you happy for a buck since 199X

Cubemario posted:

This seems to be the best place to ask: Why do people still play SC2K and SC3? I wonder what makes those versions stand out, that some people would prefer them over SC4.

SC4 is leaps and bounds better as a city simulator but has a certain sterility to it. SC3K and SC2K were more lighthearted and gamey, and in many ways more fun to play.

# ¿ May 2, 2013 21:31

Eric the Mauve: May 8, 2012; Making you happy for a buck since 199X

If The Sims 4 requires always-online it will be the end of EA.

# ¿ May 5, 2013 20:05

Eric the Mauve: May 8, 2012; Making you happy for a buck since 199X

In this case yeah, they're doing it right. Even EA is in no position to gently caress with the IRS.

# ¿ May 6, 2013 22:01

Eric the Mauve: May 8, 2012; Making you happy for a buck since 199X

I'm pretty sure SimCity and The Sims would have entirely different devteams. Madden 14 doesn't get less dev time and money because The Sims 4 was announced.

# ¿ May 6, 2013 23:08

Eric the Mauve: May 8, 2012; Making you happy for a buck since 199X

Crash74 posted:

Just to let you know you are going to be waiting until hell freezes over, maybe longer than that.

Something something shipment of brimstone to keep fire going got stuck in a loop and never made it something.

# ¿ May 7, 2013 00:39

Eric the Mauve: May 8, 2012; Making you happy for a buck since 199X

i81icu812 posted:

Star Wars has been dead for years. EA is the authority on wringing every last cent out of dead IP before consigning it to the scrap heap forever.

Let's not be soft on the bastards. When it comes to SimCity, EA is a murderer, not a scavenger.

# ¿ May 7, 2013 01:27

Eric the Mauve: May 8, 2012; Making you happy for a buck since 199X

If I recall correctly Will Wright was publicly enthusiastic about the execrable SimCity Societies, saying SimCity had gotten way too complicated. He was of the opinion 3000 was overcomplicated, to say nothing of 4.

He was the right man in the right place at the right time in 1989. I can't see anything about that that qualifies him as an expert on the gaming marketplace in 2013, even if I personally happen to agree with his very general opinion that the spirit of SimCity is more "fun toy" than "serious simulation".

# ¿ May 7, 2013 16:02

Eric the Mauve: May 8, 2012; Making you happy for a buck since 199X

crowfeathers posted:

Frankly, I don't know why they'd care. The last thread showed that even people who knew the game was bad would continually appear to post in the thread about how they decided to drop $60 bucks on it. With that in mind, I don't know if SimCity will lose money. Seems like riding the brand into the ground is actually working out pretty well for them!

It isn't a total catastrophe for them but I doubt they're doing a lot better than breaking even on it--and they destroyed an extremely valuable IP to do so. Smart investors will see the bad moon rising and get the hell out. All EA can hope now is that there are enough dumb investors to keep them going until they can get Sims 4 out.

# ¿ May 8, 2013 12:53

Eric the Mauve: May 8, 2012; Making you happy for a buck since 199X

I think the 1 million pre-orders on this steaming pile of poo poo proves SimCity is a resilient brand. But resilient does not equal invincible. The only way EA is ever going to bring SimCity back to life after this is by (a) publicly apologizing for SimShitty, (b) being very open and honest throughout a new game's development and continually saying "this is how we did it wrong last time, this is how we're doing it right now" and then following through with it, and (c) making the next game both moddable and fully playable with no internet connection at all.

But we'll never get to (b) or (c) because unless its entire leadership drastically changes, EA will never get so far as admitting it hosed up.

# ¿ May 8, 2013 14:12

Eric the Mauve: May 8, 2012; Making you happy for a buck since 199X

Edited out because upon reflection, I'm not helping anything with a content-free post.

So instead I'll just observe that I am mystified that anyone could possibly pay $60 for this game, play it until it's unplayable and say "welp, I got 6 hours of enjoyment for my $60, that's not bad!" what the gently caress, really?

Eric the Mauve fucked around with this message at 01:42 on May 9, 2013

# ¿ May 9, 2013 01:39

Eric the Mauve: May 8, 2012; Making you happy for a buck since 199X

MrBims posted:

Can it really only be those? Can't be just someone having ironic humor at EA's expense?

It could, but paid shills are a lot more likely, especially given how generally clueless EA's PR department appears to be. All common sense would suggest EA should either take its shills off the grid or deploy them strictly on spin control ("OK, the game has some problems but it's not that bad, you can still get a good 6 hours of entertainment for your $60 and there might still be some good fixes down the road...") but with EA PR who knows, at least some of the shills might still be in full-denial "11/10 greatest achievement in the history of human endeavour!" mode.

The quoted mini-review is definitely either a shill or someone mocking shills, just based on the words used, though.

# ¿ May 9, 2013 05:07

Eric the Mauve: May 8, 2012; Making you happy for a buck since 199X

^ This post made me laugh partly because it's likely pretty close to what is going on at EA. Also because it immediately made me think of this:

# ¿ May 11, 2013 03:37

Eric the Mauve: May 8, 2012; Making you happy for a buck since 199X

People keep getting tempted to buy it because it's very pretty and the SimCity brand is an irresistible siren song. That's all. It's not hard to comprehend.

# ¿ May 13, 2013 22:26

Eric the Mauve: May 8, 2012; Making you happy for a buck since 199X

xzzy posted:

I'd start giving out my origin login and letting random people play the game on my account before advocating anyone spend $60 on this festering pile.

But knowing EA they'd notice the game being played all over the world and ban the account.. and I don't want to lose my copy of SC4.

SC4 goes on sale on Steam for $5 about once a month.

# ¿ May 14, 2013 03:29

Eric the Mauve: May 8, 2012; Making you happy for a buck since 199X

I suspect EA stands to lose more from you leaving Origin behind in favor of Steam and never returning than they stand to gain from the $3 profit from the transaction.

# ¿ May 14, 2013 05:24

Eric the Mauve: May 8, 2012; Making you happy for a buck since 199X

HappyHelmet posted:

The worst part is they can't even do Madden right. Last years game sucked rear end, but plenty of people bought it anyway because it's the only football game in town.

A lot of fans of the EA sports franchises (Madden, NHL, MVP Baseball, NBA Live) regard the 2005 version of each sport's game (except for NHL 2004, which still has an active modding scene today) as the best game in the series. 2006 was when EA acquired exclusive licenses locking out competitors (except NHL but no one cares about hockey). Funny, that.

# ¿ May 28, 2013 12:52

Eric the Mauve: May 8, 2012; Making you happy for a buck since 199X

Endorph posted:

People are talking about suing because a game they paid $60 for literally does not work, and EA is acting like petulant children about refunds.

No, they're acting like thieves about refunds. There's a difference.

# ¿ May 28, 2013 18:37

Eric the Mauve: May 8, 2012; Making you happy for a buck since 199X

SimShitty is kind of a feather in the hat of those who think gaming is an addiction for a lot of people and gamers just can't help themselves. Clearly what is needed here is federally enforced warning labels on all EA products and a ban on TV and internet advertising.

# ¿ May 29, 2013 20:29

Eric the Mauve: May 8, 2012; Making you happy for a buck since 199X

Nissan� Leafs� actually.

# ¿ May 29, 2013 22:47

Eric the Mauve: May 8, 2012; Making you happy for a buck since 199X

Goddammit, no. A sandbox game gives you cleverly designed tools to play with and you derive the fun from building things with them. The fun comes from interacting with your own imagination, not the loving game designer.

God it's aggravating to hear shitlords like this rear end in a top hat try to tell me my fun's supposed to come from discovering how awesome his game mechanics are. Hand me some tools and get the hell out of the way.

# ¿ May 31, 2013 21:04

Eric the Mauve: May 8, 2012; Making you happy for a buck since 199X

^ I'm certain all of the things you suggested were planned for expansion packs. Whether we'll actually see said expansion packs or not remains to be seen. _{If EA does put them out, please don't buy them}

# ¿ Jun 5, 2013 23:49

Eric the Mauve: May 8, 2012; Making you happy for a buck since 199X

The Kid Kisser posted:

Hi, Mayors � today we are announcing that we are moving the release date of the Mac version of SimCity to August. We have made this tough decision because we do not believe it is ready for primetime yet. We want to ensure the Mac is a great experience for our players and that is why we are taking more time.

http://www.simcity.com/en_US/blog/article/simcity-mac-update-and-beyond

Amazing.

Please put my money on "Mac development has already been scrapped and EA is lying through their teeth and will push it back a few times before admitting it's dead", sir.

# ¿ Jun 6, 2013 20:07

Eric the Mauve: May 8, 2012; Making you happy for a buck since 199X

It was just a port of SimCity 3000 with some minor updates if I recall correctly.

# ¿ Jun 7, 2013 22:54

Eric the Mauve: May 8, 2012; Making you happy for a buck since 199X

WeaponBoy posted:

Plus, the cities are too small. I hope they gathered enough user hardware data to figure out that they need to make the bloody cities larger.

Wasn't it confirmed a couple months ago that SimShitty already has the functionality to support much larger cities but EA was holding it out all along for a $30 or $40 expansion pack?

# ¿ Jun 24, 2013 15:19

Eric the Mauve: May 8, 2012; Making you happy for a buck since 199X

Sounds as good as confirmation to me, yeah.

e: elf help book: I have no doubt it was held back for DLC. Even a casual observer of EA's standard business practices ("market the poo poo out of pre-orders, release the beta, let everyone who paid $60 for the privilege of being your beta testers do so, fix bugs a little at a time and package them with some things we coded months ago and have been holding out and release them as $30-a-pop DLC until by the end of it all millions of people have paid $250 for the game that should have existed at release") can tell that.

# ¿ Jun 24, 2013 15:29

Eric the Mauve: May 8, 2012; Making you happy for a buck since 199X

kedo posted:

You're technically correct, but they're just going about trying to increase profitability it in a lovely way. I mean, look at Google. That's a publicly traded company that frequently blows lots of money on off the wall crazy stuff, but the vast majority of their profits come from AdWords. If Google was run like EA, they wouldn't be making Glass or self driving cars or what have you, they'd be finding new and more obnoxious ways to put their ads in front of your face.

They've been doing a good job of that lately. In the past couple weeks I've self-blacklisted several websites I used to frequent because they will not stop pissing me off with self-playing video ads that restart with full sound in 30 seconds if you try to pause or mute them.

I'm pretty sure that if advertising keeps moving in this direction I'll end up going off the grid in a few years. I figured I wouldn't turn into an anti-technology curmudgeon until I was at least 65, but Marketing might get me there before I'm 40.

# ¿ Jun 24, 2013 15:49

Eric the Mauve: May 8, 2012; Making you happy for a buck since 199X

The longer I live the more convinced I get that from a business/sales perspective, high-end graphics in video games are not that important.

# ¿ Jun 24, 2013 17:10

Eric the Mauve: May 8, 2012; Making you happy for a buck since 199X

ToxicSlurpee posted:

Artists are cheaper than programmers.

Programmers do cost money, which is why making them spend so much of their time on the graphics engine is probably grossly inefficient.

# ¿ Jun 24, 2013 17:22

Eric the Mauve: May 8, 2012; Making you happy for a buck since 199X

EA's philosophy of tricking and robbing customers will eventually destroy the company, but we're not there yet and probably not very close yet. The philosophy is bad for the company, but very, very good for the specific executives that have been running it the past ten years, who can drive off into the sunset with their millions upon millions of dollars, gleefully cackling, just before the company collapses.

# ¿ Jun 24, 2013 18:25

Eric the Mauve: May 8, 2012; Making you happy for a buck since 199X

^ Yes, exactly. Gaming companies (EA being just the most prominent among them) have figured out that hardcore gamers are addicted and will give you money for games even if they hate you, and casual gamers don't know or care about your business practices and will buy if the marketing is good.

It won't last forever, though. A bad reputation in any market will eventually snowball until it crushes you. But that doesn't matter to EA's current leadership.

# ¿ Jun 24, 2013 18:32

Eric the Mauve: May 8, 2012; Making you happy for a buck since 199X

The most likely explanation for what happened is that EA's top executives (CEO/department presidents) made a conscious decision to cash in the SimCity IP for immediate revenue, knowing it would be the end of the franchise. So yes, SimCity the brand is now dead. But in time EA's gently caress-the-customer business practices will ruin the company as a whole. Even Madden and The Sims won't go on forever.

# ¿ Jun 24, 2013 18:35

Eric the Mauve: May 8, 2012; Making you happy for a buck since 199X

Sooner or later EA will do something colossally stupid and that will commence their slide into oblivion. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but...

e: SimShitty doesn't qualify as colossally stupid, as it killed only the SimCity franchise and nothing else and likely accomplished its intended purpose (a quick revenue grab).

# ¿ Jun 24, 2013 18:58

Eric the Mauve: May 8, 2012; Making you happy for a buck since 199X

All they had to do was make SimCity 3000 with modern graphics and UI and a few minor Simmy tweaks. That's it. It would have sold by the millions and millions and millions.

# ¿ Aug 26, 2013 03:48

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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 10:54

Eric the Mauve: May 8, 2012; Making you happy for a buck since 199X

xzzy posted:

The tiny plots seems like one of those producer mandates to make sure the game will run on a toaster. The fact that the dashed line is a completely arbitrary border that people wrote hacks to build beyond is evidence of that.. the game fully supports bigger cities, they just chose not to let us try it.

I thought it was confirmed long ago that EA was in fact planning on making bigger cities part of the $49.99 expansion pack a few months down the road.

# ¿ Aug 31, 2013 14:12

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