BigJKO

SimCity: The City Simulator

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Yeah, they (Polygon) have done themselves no favors by lowering the score twice now. Their review-by-committee system is weird in and of itself, though. I'm also not a fan of arbitrary numbers being used to denote a game/film/album's quality anyways simply because of how many companies use the 7-10 Scale. EA could easily look at just the early impressions and say "Oh wow, look at all of these 9s! Nothing was wrong with the game, let's do another!". Or, and perhaps more likely, they'll use only the lower scores like these and deny bonuses to the developers like Bethesda did to the New Vegas team.

 

Well, it doesn't look like Metacritic is going to reflect the changed Polygon score, so it remains a 95, the second highest review for the game after Eurogamer Sweden's 100.

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Yeah, they (Polygon) have done themselves no favors by lowering the score twice now. Their review-by-committee system is weird in and of itself, though. I'm also not a fan of arbitrary numbers being used to denote a game/film/album's quality anyways simply because of how many companies use the 7-10 Scale. EA could easily look at just the early impressions and say "Oh wow, look at all of these 9s! Nothing was wrong with the game, let's do another!". Or, and perhaps more likely, they'll use only the lower scores like these and deny bonuses to the developers like Bethesda did to the New Vegas team.

 

It's just an absolute shame how this has turned out. The devs deserve much, much better than this. The game looks fantastic, and most non-server-related complaints could easily be patched out. But instead this debacle is the main focus.

Why do they deserve better than this?

 

They made the call to make the game bound to server capacity when such a thing was not necessary and are now paying the price of that choice. Everyone acknowledges that they have a great game, but having a great game that no one can play is tantamount to not having a game at all.

 

If they insist on making the game a service instead of a primarily local experience, then they need to start acting like a service company. My biggest problem with all these companies which are trying to skirt the line between the notions of ownership and rental, services versus products, is that they try to take only the parts of the two worlds that are convenient for them while conveying none of advantages of either to the consumer. If you want to make it a licensed piece of software that you rent as a service, whether that rental is in the form of a one time fee or not, then you need to take providing that service seriously.

 

If this happened in the telecommunications or computing sectors, there would be no "deserves... better" or it's "shame" they would be done. There would be no second chances.

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I'm really curious how much of the simulation is running server-side. One of the things the latest patch 'fixed' was disabling the Cheetah speed level. That kind of makes me wonder if it's writing events to the server in realtime (which seems like an inefficient save strategy) or if its the server doing at least some of the processing in the game.

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Presumably because the devs didn't choose any of this online DRM bullshit - EA required it. That would be my guess at least.

 

Is there anything to suggest that this is the case? I'm not saying there isn't, I'm genuinely curious.

 

I spoke too soon when I said that things went surprisingly smoothly for me. When I got home from work, I was not able to play one minute of SimCity. I hope that EA gets as much shit as possible for their server fiasco. The amount of pre-orders simply couldn't have come as a surprise to them.

 

On the other hand, I sure would like to play the game over the weekend.

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Well the main thing to suggest it's the case is that nobody in the entire world would ever want to stay continually connected to a server just to get stuff like leaderboards and less-than-real-time connection to other players' cities in your region, because all that stuff could be handled asynchronously, which would save lots of headaches for people with intermittent Internet connections. Like, what is the benefit of requiring 24/7 connectivity aside from EA's silly attempts to stem piracy? What does it add to the game?

 

tabacco wonders whether the server is actually doing processing for your city - that would be pretty interesting, and I've heard as much has been claimed, but I've [ii]also[/i] heard that if you drop a connection it gives you a bit of time to reconnect, seamlessly, while your city is still going, so it's tough to imagine that the server is truly necessary for any of this stuff.

 

Basically it seems like if I were a Sim City dev I'd leave the always-on DRM out of it because it isn't helping my game.

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This has probably been the single most disastrous launch I've ever seen. After Maxis's last game (Spore) went through the same shit and became the year's most pirated game in addition to sparking off massive DRM controversies, how the fuck were decisions made within Maxis/EA that led to this?

I feel sorry for many of the developers because from what I can see there's actually a really good game beneath all this, that can scratch that simulation itch many of us have been feeling for some years since the genre disintegrated over a decade ago. But the game's had so many bad reviews as a direct result of these issues that it doesn't stand a chance of living up to its potential. How many people are going to hit the 'buy' button after seeing the 1000+ 1-star Amazon reviews?

I suspect what'll happen is EA will solve these issues, make dedicated fans happy with less intrusive DRM and bigger cities, then re-release the game either as a special edition or an iterative sequel in less than a year so they have another chance with the mainstream/casual buyers (who would ordinarily constitute a large part of a Maxis game's audience). Saving the review scores of this release is pretty much a lost cause.

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People keep referring to the thing as DRM, whilst my impression is there's a lot going on server-side, almost like a regular MMO game. Have they said exactly what is done where? For example, can you log on from any computer and still get access to all your stuff? Maybe they're storing everything server-side, and only leaving the actual simulation number-crunching to the local computer. Does the city evolve while you're not playing? You're able to view and interact with other people's cities asynchronously, right?

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I don't believe anything's been given away in that respect. I suspect it's largely marketing smoke and mirrors; how else can you justify this absolute disaster if all people stand to gain from such a recklessly heavy-handed approach to online connectivity is leaderboards and the relatively minor multiplayer aspects? I just can't imagine what the game could possibly be doing that'd require remote computing.

 

Sure the game has sophisticated simulation and that's probably helped their marketing department to sell the idea, but I really can't see it being beyond modern hardware, even at the lower end. And if it really is to help out those with truly shit computers, why not just offload it for that end of the market? It'd both alleviate much if not all of the stress on the cloud hardware, as well as let people benefit from using the hardware they've bought to enjoy a more responsive experience.

 

The whole thing has just been terribly planned and executed, with a rabid desire to stop pirates (and seemingly any other fucker) from playing the game at any cost. I work with cloud computers and big software launches so I understand the difficulties involved, but it's a problem that countless web-based companies deal with and overcome on a daily basis. I'm not sure why games industry companies keep getting it so wrong but they're clearly not hiring the right talent for the job.

 

Ironically, maybe it was the unbelievably high piracy levels of Spore — spurred on by the (at the time) aggressive DRM EA and Maxis implemented — that prompted them to try so hard to make this game impossible to pirate.

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I'm really curious how much of the simulation is running server-side. One of the things the latest patch 'fixed' was disabling the Cheetah speed level. That kind of makes me wonder if it's writing events to the server in realtime (which seems like an inefficient save strategy) or if its the server doing at least some of the processing in the game.

 

My understanding is that none of the simulation is done on the server, but the simulation affects variables available to both the region and game in general. You buy coal from "the market", then that's something the server has to adjust too. 4chan came up with the idea of building a nuclear power plant, selling the electricity to others in the region, and then selling the power plant after everyone else is reliant on it. Boom! Instant power outage in all other cities in the region.

 

Evil in the usual 4chan manner, but it demonstrates how the servers interact with the game. That the whole debacle seems unnecessary, mostly because the vast majority of players seem more interested in playing it as a single player game, clearly demonstrates that someone went amiss somewhere. I suspect, from reading pre-release interviews, it was the devs themselves. They got it into their mind that this sort of multiplayer interaction is something people would want, without ever actually testing it. It seems obvious in retrospect that they were wrong, and that they were vastly underprepared for the demands on the servers this would cause, as anyone that's launched an MMO could have told them.

 

So it's a good game, somewhere in there I've no doubt. But to "delay the review' or other such tactics is to make an excuse for something that is utterly predictable, and that is launch day is always big. Assuredly buying too many servers can be costly, but if they were smart they would have used a public cloud to run everything, spooling up everything they needed as demand changed. Guess that probably didn't occur to them; though now that I think about it I can foresee the nickel and diming they will do to pay for the cost of the servers few want.

 

Tl;Dr it's certainly at least partially the dev's fault, they're almost certainly planning on nickel and diming you to death for things that any other previous Sim City release would have had from the get go; and thinking all this through I'm not sure how bad I feel for them anymore. I guess it depends on exactly HOW they'll try to eak more money out. Still, I'd much rather see Valve's attitude of "build the best game you can first, figure out how to sell it after that."

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The whole thing has just been terribly planned and executed, with a rabid desire to stop pirates (and seemingly any other fucker) from playing the game at any cost. I work with cloud computers and big software launches so I understand the difficulties involved, but it's a problem that countless web-based companies deal with and overcome on a daily basis. I'm not sure why games industry companies keep getting it so wrong but they're clearly not hiring the right talent for the job.

 

I would guess that the game industry has a lot of problems trying to attract, and retain, experienced talent.

 

The game industry is worth something on the order of $80 billion a year. $80 billion is around how much the whole of Microsoft makes in a year. Samsung Electronics, a subsidiary of Samsung, makes more than twice that in a year. Apple flat out has more than $80 billion sitting around in cash on hand right now. Quite a few of the companies where you'd find these experts have revenues that are either in the rough ballpark of the entire games industry or more. The vast majority of game companies are not going to be able to compete with these guys for talent, infrastructure, or resources.

 

If you're making a solid 120K plus salary at Google with benefits, perks, stock options, a 45 - 50 hour work week, with interesting work that benefits a very large portion of the world and peers who helped create some of the most interesting technology today, why would you join the game industry? You'd have less impact on society, take a significant pay cut, with worse benefits, worse perks, no options, worse hours, and would likely have generally worse working conditions on what might not even be as interesting work. That doesn't sound like a good deal.

 

The other thing is it's one thing to have a couple experts, it's another thing to have a couple experts sitting beside the guy who co-invented C, or the world's leading expert on computer vision, or any number of exceptional people the tech sector happens to have scattered all over the place. Even if you attract some talent, it's not the same as having a very wide and deep talent pool who feed off each other.

 

Outside of Valve and maybe Blizzard, what game company can really attract the kind of experience that would make these things solid? Even if you did attract them, poor management can squander all of that talent and the game industry isn't exactly known for having good management.

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I think you're giving the non-Video game software industry too much credit. There is a difference in how products are developed, as the non-video games industry usually keep upgrading its existing product. So the knowledge people gather over time is valuable. People in the video games industry can more easily be handled like construction workers, especially the people who are not required during the whole development cycle.

Anyway, bad management is also present in the rest of the software industry. I think it's mostly caused by the fact that bad management does not understand the craft of software development. They think it's like building a house, or something else which is more or less the same thing every time. The places that do have good management the management often came from software development, and is usually still active.

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People keep referring to the thing as DRM, whilst my impression is there's a lot going on server-side, almost like a regular MMO game. Have they said exactly what is done where? For example, can you log on from any computer and still get access to all your stuff? Maybe they're storing everything server-side, and only leaving the actual simulation number-crunching to the local computer. Does the city evolve while you're not playing? You're able to view and interact with other people's cities asynchronously, right?

 

According to the customer service guy (to whom I was able to vent my frustration after an hour of queuing) you can continue building your city on a different computer because the information is stored in the server. This also means that you always have to use the same server unless you want to start anew. If that particular server is down you can't just connect to another one and continue playing. Keep this in mind before you decide to try that Oceanic server because every European server is full.

 

The fact that they had to disable the fastest game speed does indeed sound quite worrying. I'm curious to learn more about the server implementation as well. 

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I think you're giving the non-Video game software industry too much credit. There is a difference in how products are developed, as the non-video games industry usually keep upgrading its existing product. So the knowledge people gather over time is valuable. People in the video games industry can more easily be handled like construction workers, especially the people who are not required during the whole development cycle.

 

Anyway, bad management is also present in the rest of the software industry. I think it's mostly caused by the fact that bad management does not understand the craft of software development. They think it's like building a house, or something else which is more or less the same thing every time. The places that do have good management the management often came from software development, and is usually still active.

 

I'm not talking about the industry in general, but rather the very limited subset of developers they'd be interested in. People who have practical experience in designing and building large scale distributed systems, or working with big iron, don't grow on trees just like people who have practical experience writing graphics card firmware are not the most common developers in the world. If you don't buy that experience, you need to develop the talent in house and that doesn't happen overnight.

 

I don't doubt there's some really smart people working on games, and some that clearly have the requisite experience given companies like Blizzard and CCP today, but I have the distinct impression that many game companies are far lighter on experience than they really need to be. I have a lot of friends who started in the game industry, but I can't recall a single one who still works in the industry today. It seems like the game industry bleeds talent and has a hard time attracting experienced developers from other fields. That doesn't seem like a particularly good situation.

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This all sets up the Starcraft 2: Heart of the Swarm release next week quite interestingly.

 

If they get it right it's going to make EA look even worse than they already do, and if they get it wrong we may get even more vocal backlash against this. Something I bet execs at Microsoft or Sony are watching very carefully as they think about doing something similar to pc drm to try and eliminated the used games trade in their next gen consoles. 

 
A side thought about how much responsibility the Devs have for this I wonder if they were basically told by the corporate side of the business " you must have always on DRM", and started thinking " OK we have to be always online, what can we do with that which is actually positive?". 
 
Still in the end i can't help but think next time someone's facing this choice they should just stick a damn offline mode on it. Even if it only has a limited duration, or limited feature set it would still avoid this clusterfuck.

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Did they have any problems with the Wings of Liberty launch? Also, was SC2 single player as intrinsically always-online as SimCity and Diablo 3? I mean, it probably required you to be logged in but it didn't lag in single player like Diablo 3 did for me.

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I'm not talking about the industry in general, but rather the very limited subset of developers they'd be interested in. People who have practical experience in designing and building large scale distributed systems, or working with big iron, don't grow on trees just like people who have practical experience writing graphics card firmware are not the most common developers in the world. If you don't buy that experience, you need to develop the talent in house and that doesn't happen overnight.

 

I don't doubt there's some really smart people working on games, and some that clearly have the requisite experience given companies like Blizzard and CCP today, but I have the distinct impression that many game companies are far lighter on experience than they really need to be. I have a lot of friends who started in the game industry, but I can't recall a single one who still works in the industry today. It seems like the game industry bleeds talent and has a hard time attracting experienced developers from other fields. That doesn't seem like a particularly good situation.

 

Still, it's a common problem in the software industry. Companies rarely want to pay for talent (it's more or less the "my nephew is good with computers; how hard can it be"). The Video game industry just makes it worse by stripping away any sense of job security. Although similar stuff also happens in the VFX industry.

So yeah, talent will pursue careers in other directions were "shipping less that 3m units in 6 months" doesn't result in a studio closure.

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Did they have any problems with the Wings of Liberty launch? Also, was SC2 single player as intrinsically always-online as SimCity and Diablo 3? I mean, it probably required you to be logged in but it didn't lag in single player like Diablo 3 did for me.

 

From what I remember you did have to be logged on to Battle-net to play and have your progress saved, but that there was a "offline mode" which allowed you to play a bit (Skirmishes v the AI I think). THEre were some problems during (mainly log in que's & servers being down, but nothing of the scale of this).

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From what I remember you did have to be logged on to Battle-net to play and have your progress saved, but that there was a "offline mode" which allowed you to play a bit (Skirmishes v the AI I think). THEre were some problems during (mainly log in que's & servers being down, but nothing of the scale of this).

 

Ah, now that you mention it I remember a couple of instances of not being able to log-in. It wasn't close to the problems I had with Diablo 3, though.

 

Here's a an accurate browser-version of the SimCity experience: http://tholman.com/playable-simcity-2013/

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Experiencing noticeable effects of network latency while playing a game solo is irritating as hell. I decided to fuck around in Diablo 3 just a few days ago, and I was warping all over the place; I was playing in hardcore mode, which makes it a pretty worrying and potentially fatal wrinkle.

 

I've never sensed anything like that in StarCraft II, so I think all of the important action is happening locally in that one. 

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You know the daft thing is, when I go to the supermarket tonight to do a bit of food shopping I know I'm going to see SimCity on the shelves and despite all this I'm still going to be lucky if my willpower doesn't give in and I end up walking out of there with a copy in hand :P

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Luckily for me I picked up another game this week and can't really bring myself to dump more money on other games at the moment.  I really enjoy the beta a ton and decided then that I was totally going to buy this.  I honestly don't care about server issues as those will get resolved by the time that I am going to start playing this.  What worries me is the idea that they are going to attempt to expand this like they did with the Sims.  I can totally see this being a thousand dollar hole you could fall into just for functionality that should ahve been there to start.

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Check this shit out! Good effort from someone.

 

http://www.p4rgaming.com/?p=1473

 

 

Play4Real: Rumor has it that you are being paid by EA, is this true?

citybuilder229: No, this is not true.

Play4Real: Then why are you posting only good things about SimCity’s always online requirement?

citybuilder229: Because I was told by EA representative to post them.

Play4Real: But you said you weren’t being paid by EA.

citybuilder229: I have not been paid yet.

:tup:

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I managed to get in a region with a couple of friends last night on the Euro 1 server (we're all in the US, but it was the only one that would let us get in together.)

 

First off, the region invites didn't show up in the game at all. My friend had sent me three invites over the course of 10 minutes. I got no notifications, and the region page still said "you must be invited to play." On a lark, I clicked the claim button, and it let me in.

 

Once we did get in, the asynchronous stuff was a bit wierd. When one of my neighbors would build a town hall addition, I'd get the offical game notification about it maybe 5 or 10 minutes later. Other things like sharing service vehicles and such seemed to happen a little faster. Sending sewage across zones worked all right, but water still has the bug that they showed in the Giant Bomb videos where all the gauges say that you're buying enough water but some zones say they're out. We all had powerplants, so we didn't get a chance to test that. 

 

Something that's a bit unclear is how selling resources works. I'm the only person in the region with a coal mine, so I'd like to sell to friends at a reduced rate, but my only options are to use locally or export to the global market. Use locally isn't exactly clear if they mean in my one city, or in the region (a common confusion across the entire game) but from watching the coal flow it looks like it's only going to my power plant. So the only way to share resources (aside from sending gifts or working on a great project) is to sell to the global market and then your neighbor buys from the global market, which is dumb.

 

Speaking of the global market, the price seems to fluxuate based on external forces of some kind. Hopefully, it's based on supply and demand, but it could just be someone back at Maxis headquarters twiddling a knob for all I know. With all the information that they give you about how your city is running, I'd really like to have more options and info about regional and global trade. Even better would be able to set my own prices and let people buy or not.

 

All those complaints, yet I had a blast and stayed up until midnight (others were east coast and were up until 2am.) If the server issues clear up and they fix and clarify the inter-city trading mechanics, this is a pretty awesome game.

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