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

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.

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.

Beamed posted:

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

Ugly In The Morning posted:

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.

Undead Unicorn posted:

The op quote mentions this game was a failure right? Was it one financially at all or just from a creative standpoint? Seriously EA white knighting is a getting annoying to me online.

Air Julio posted:

Has anyone cracked D3 yet? Not trying to be snide, just asking.

ExtraNoise posted:

If EA attempts and succeeds with ruining their (possibly) largest franchise on the PC, what will be left for them?

Police Automaton posted:

Gaming nerds have very poor impulse control.

Denzine posted:

I think you're all mistaking the validity of music and movies as artistic mediums with what their respective industries actually put out.

edit: I realize I'm being unfair to Nickelback by putting a joke about them next to Bee Movie.

Lucy Heartfilia posted:

But aren't video game sales very similar to movie ticket sales? Most of them happening in the first few weeks and so on?

No Safe Word posted:

Excuse me, Simcity has won 26 PC game awards

No Safe Word posted:

KnifeWrench posted:

Peter Moore certainly did his best to spin it into a badge of honor.

Shumagorath posted:

DeclaredYuppie posted:

Only if that margin is a meaningful driver of additional profits. Even if EA charges itself $0 to distribute through Origins (which I'd say is a shady transfer price even if it's close to accurate), how much are they paying to box their games? $1 a box? So at most a 1.5% cost driver?

kedo posted:

If any of you in this thread buy an EA game ever again, I will be sorely disappointed in you. They need to be run out of business.

Reason posted:

This game has led me to pretty much never purchase an EA game again. I kind of want to play BF4 because I do enjoy the Battlefield games, but I'm just so upset. I really DO enjoy the first hour/hour and a half of a city in SimCity then you hit 'the wall', literally, figuratively. I really hope those awesome modders do something to unleash SimCity, some of the stuff that let you build in regions looked promising and if they could open up an entire region and offline mode I'd probably play the game.

I mean, people were comparing this to Diablo 3, but at least Diablo 3 is fun after an hour of playing.

Shumagorath posted:

-Vehicles (even if jets hurt more than they help)
-The best sound design in the industry by a wide margin
-Projectile physics instead of hitscan weapons in loving 2013
-Acceleration (as in you don't instantly move at full sprint and have to slow down too)

Air Julio posted:

This thread is amazing. Every time I feel the righteous indignation can't get any worse, goons find a way to top themselves.

Seriously, are you that weak-willed?

Mendrian posted:

So you're saying that you're making Hate EA a lifestyle choice. You're making it a part of your identity, removing any of the hated EA scriptures from your home.

Mozi posted:

The problems with this game, beyond the online issues, are fundamental and, I think, unfixable. So while they'll do bugfixes and put out some contractually-obligated DLC, the game is headed for oblivion sooner rather than later.

Endorph posted:

* Fixed bug where Firemen would stop on the way to a fire to ride rollercoasters.

Martytoof posted:

Shut up shut up shut up la la la not listening






Oh man this is going to be the case, isn't it?

WeaponBoy posted:

Second, I know people freaked out because Syndicate wasn't an isometric strategy game, but Syndicate was actually a ton of fun, both in single and multiplayer.

rickiep00h posted:

people that talk about class action suits against Blizzard get laughed right the gently caress out of the WoW threads

Zelder posted:

Wasn't Daikatana completely horrible, buggy, and parts of it were unplayable?

WeaponBoy posted:

I still have no idea why Origin says you need to download 12 gigs of data. Doesn't the install folder only hold like 3.5 once the game is downloaded?

The Sharmat posted:

Rome: Total War shipped with an AI that didn't understand the concept of rivers. It wasn't a glitch or anything, they just didn't give the AI an awareness of the fact that it couldn't cross water without a ford or bridge. This lead to hilarious battles where it would march all of its troops blindly forward, and the ones that weren't lucky enough to have a crossing in the way just walked into the river and drowned.