SimCity: The City Simulator

[I Saw Dasein]

My experience is that it will work fine for a while, then completely stop working. So you will be depending on electricity from another city, then suddenly that connection will "break" and you'll be out of power. Or you will send money from one city to another, only to see that money disappear into the aether. Or you will build a city hall module, but that module will not properly unlock in other cities in the region; eventually it may unlock, only to re-lock. So the online connectivity has been very sporadic for me. I also have been basically unable to join truly multiplayer games (because for me the region browser will only display full regions); these were all experiences I had while running multiple cities in the same region. 

 

Because of all of these problems, I've pretty much given up attempting to use the regional features. Thus for me, the game has been single-player only. The authorial intent may have been that the game be multiplayer, but that's not how I experience it. I am enjoying the game without the multiplayer, so at least for me the multiplayer is not integral to the experience. And I actually suspect far more people are playing basically singleplayer than they are multiplayer, at least so far. 

[toblix]

Oh hey, a blog update! Apparently they've got traffic improvements on the way.

[Flynn]

Yes, including a video of the updated traffic:

 

[I Saw Dasein]

Does anyone have any idea how tax is calculated? Like when I set tax rate to 10%, what is it 10% of? Is it based on the zoning or does the kind of building matter? Do sims pay tax, or buildings, or both? 

 

I hate how this shit is all hidden. For a game that was supposed to make all of the mechanics graphical, a lot of these basic rules are totally obscure. The manual is also pathetic. 

[Twig]

I thought it was based on how many sims are in that bracket/occupation.

 

Although I'm not sure if there's a way to see THAT number. I feel like there must be. Probably in that population breakdown that I never look at. U:

[BigJKO]

Oh, sweet! That video is so great. Look forward to more of these little blog posts about fixing stuff. I can not wait to play the Mac version.. Although that might be less of a priority for Maxis now..

Also, to clarify I don't care about the always-online. I'm ALWAYS online.  And I will probably enjoy the shit out of the game. Just that little video makes me the happiest. As long as the region stuff becomes more reliable and I can join other Thumbateers in a region I'll be glad.

 

I'll be plopping down a big poop city right next to you, toblix, for arguing with me!

[toblix]

I'll take your poop and trade it for profit. Then I'll send all my uneducated hobos over to Pooptown to burn stuff in drums.

 

I wouldn't worry about the Mac version. First of all, they probably have a separate team working on that. Second, they seem to be back on their expected schedule now. Server capacity problems are fixed (as I understand it ...) and they're doing regular patching.

[BigJKO]

WHAT?! After all that poop I gave you? I can't sell hobos..

[Jake]

Hobo trade DLC.

[toblix]

hobolog.ea.com

[Frenetic Pony]

 

I have come from the year 2016 to show unto thee Sim City (2016)!

 

Jk but can you imagine? Look at all those transportation options, parking simulations, all that individualistic pathfinding, AMAAAAAZING.

[Codicier]

OK guys I need either talking into or out of getting this game.

 

Since EA are still giving away a free game away to anyone who registers up until march 18th if I'm going to bite I may as well do so now.

 

I have been sitting on the fence pretty much since launch day looking at the game and thinking "boy it looks really contrived at times, and there's are a lot of flaws to this thing", but at the same time I'm thinking "they seem really interesting flaws, I want to play around with the game and see if I can get it to do weird stuff"

 

I'm not hearing the cries of woe that I used to on twitter so i guess the servers are at least somewhat stable.

 

So gentlemen who have already bought the game, if i go in expecting something flawed but interesting should I be able to enjoy it?

 

(my indecision isn't being helped by the fact Anno 2070 is on sale on steam for 1/4 the cost of Simcity)

[Twig]

Oh man now I want a SimCity expansion or whatever that lets me build watertop cities where all transportation is boats and also maybe just maybe crazy ziplines from tower to tower JUST BECAUSE.

[I Saw Dasein]

OK guys I need either talking into or out of getting this game.

 

Since EA are still giving away a free game away to anyone who registers up until march 18th if I'm going to bite I may as well do so now.

 

I have been sitting on the fence pretty much since launch day looking at the game and thinking "boy it looks really contrived at times, and there's are a lot of flaws to this thing", but at the same time I'm thinking "they seem really interesting flaws, I want to play around with the game and see if I can get it to do weird stuff"

 

I'm not hearing the cries of woe that I used to on twitter so i guess the servers are at least somewhat stable.

 

So gentlemen who have already bought the game, if i go in expecting something flawed but interesting should I be able to enjoy it?

 

(my indecision isn't being helped by the fact Anno 2070 is on sale on steam for 1/4 the cost of Simcity)

 

I'd pass. I like the game, but unless you're a super-fan there's no way it's worth $60, even taking into account free mystery game. 

[SecretAsianMan]

OK guys I need either talking into or out of getting this game.

 

Since EA are still giving away a free game away to anyone who registers up until march 18th if I'm going to bite I may as well do so now.

 

I have been sitting on the fence pretty much since launch day looking at the game and thinking "boy it looks really contrived at times, and there's are a lot of flaws to this thing", but at the same time I'm thinking "they seem really interesting flaws, I want to play around with the game and see if I can get it to do weird stuff"

 

I'm not hearing the cries of woe that I used to on twitter so i guess the servers are at least somewhat stable.

 

So gentlemen who have already bought the game, if i go in expecting something flawed but interesting should I be able to enjoy it?

 

(my indecision isn't being helped by the fact Anno 2070 is on sale on steam for 1/4 the cost of Simcity)

 

I am in the exact same boat.  There are stupid things I want to try, but I'm not sure I want spend $60 on something I suspect I won't play past the initial messing around.  Convince me Thumbs!

[Henroid]

Rock, Paper, Shotgun has a pretty good article about all the malarkey surrounding the game and the recent behavior on Maxis' part. It specifically brings the "it's an MMO!" crap into contention, which is something I've spent the last week trying to convince other people that it is not an MMO.

 

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/03/16/simcity-bosss-straight-answers-seem-pretty-wiggly/#more-146003

 

What Maxis are doing is frankly peculiar. Earlier this week we posted a story revealing that claims that SimCity required online servers to run non-regional computations were not the case. That night we were promised a statement from the studio, but heard nothing. Repeated emails to EA have resulted in no response since, and the whole situation has become more muddy with each day. It’s since been revealed that population numbers are nonsense, even down to leaked Javascript code featuring “simcity.GetFudgedPopulation” as a function. We’ve learned that city size limits are arbitrary, pathfinding is rudimentary at best, and Eurogamer’s absolutely superb review lists many more bugs, broken features, disappearing pretend-money and never-arriving resources.

So it’s all the more odd to see Maxis head Lucy Bradshaw acting as if none of this is happening, and instead just carefully rewording her mantra of how SimCity is only supposed to be played online, but this time leaving out the bit about server-side computations for local play.

 

This week’s fuss all began after Bradshaw’s repeated statement that SimCity needed to be online simply to function. A claim we learned was not the case.

 

On the SimCity blog on 20th December 2012 Bradshaw wrote,

“GlassBox is the engine that drives the entire game — the buildings, the economics, trading, and also the overall simulation that can track data for up to 100,000 individual Sims inside each city. There is a massive amount of computing that goes into all of this, and GlassBox works by attributing portions of the computing to EA servers (the cloud) and some on the player’s local computer.”

Speaking to Polygon on the 9th March she again said,

>

“With the way that the game works, we offload a significant amount of the calculations to our servers so that the computations are off the local PCs and are moved into the cloud. It wouldn’t be possible to make the game offline without a significant amount of engineering work by our team.”

And talking to Kotaku in the same week, Bradshaw yet again stated,

“Online connectivity as a creative game design decision was infused into the game’s DNA since its inception and so we’re fully committed to delivering against that experience first. A significant portion of the GlassBox Engine’s calculations are performed on our servers and off of the player’s PCs. It would take a significant amount of engineering work from our team to rewrite the game so that all of those functions are calculated locally without a significant performance hit to the player.”

In today’s posting the studio boss writes,

“From the ground up, we designed this game with multiplayer in mind – using new technology to realize a vision of players connected in regions to create a SimCity that captured the dynamism of the world we live in; a global, ever-changing, social world… We also made innovative use of servers to move aspects of the simulation into the cloud to support region play and social features.”

Spot the difference.

 

RPS knows that the “simulation” being run on the EA servers is about 1% of the simulation being run on your own PC, so even this rebranded version of the claim still rings a little oddly. It’s not clear what exactly is so innovative about having interactions between different players be handled by online servers – that’s kind of how multiplayer works. But yes, it’s absolutely undeniable that the multiplayer aspects of the game require connection to the, er, multiplayer servers. No one was disputing this, because to dispute that would be frog-hatted mad. The reason there was any fuss in the first place were the claims that the servers were involved in much more, aspects that were they really calculating would indeed deny the simple possibility of a single-player, non-regional version of the game.

And let’s stress again here: If Maxis wanted to make an online-only, multiplayer-only version of SimCity, then that’s their call. No one has a God-given right to a single-player version, and while deliberately shooting themselves in the foot with a cannon by refusing to offer one seems a little odd, it’s Maxis’s call. The issue that RPS has only ever wanted to tackle was getting to the truth about why not. And as many have since demonstrated with offline play hacks (there’s a new one here), we didn’t have it. We could indeed write a very decent, very sensible editorial on why not offering single-player for a SimCity game is hard-boiled lunacy, but that was never the point.

 

Bradshaw’s post, which appears to be some sort of attempt at damage limitation – without actually ever addressing the issues raised – re-emphasises the point that they wanted it to be always online because of how they designed the game. She then lists the functions those server sums supply. And they’re what we already knew – they let the social game be social. This list that is basically just “the game has co-operative multiplayer” eight times seems to be an attempt to reveal just how grand this aspect is, how intrinsic it is to… something. It doesn’t manage this. What we’re learning from the many players posting videos, and the reviewers who actually played the game properly before smothering it with rosettes, is that those regional functions don’t work very well either.

Things then take a turn for the darned strange when Bradshaw adds,

“The game we launched is only the beginning for us – it’s not final and it never will be. In many ways, we built an MMO.”

In almost no ways have they built an MMO. The first M rather puts pay to that suggestion, with minimal numbers of players interacting, and even then interacting through relatively remote systems. Let alone that it’s a management game that previously functioned perfectly well without the addition of social aspects – which is what makes it so mystifying that apparently adding something has caused so much more to be taken away. But the association with an “MMO” is an essential part of the vocabulary Maxis and EA want us to use, to reinforce the notion that this hasn’t been about piracy, preventing solo-play cheating, and controlling players’ experiences. “Oh, MMOs,” we’re supposed to say. “Yeah, good point, because you couldn’t play World Of Warcraft offline, could you? So this must be the same.” We’re asked to ignore that SimCity looks, feels and plays like a single-player game with some multiplayer functionality, and instead conflate it with an entirely different type of game. It’s a blatantly fallacious stance, but one that’s unfortunately perpetuating. (Check out many other sites’ coverage of Bradshaw’s statements this evening.) Bradshaw then says,

“So, could we have built a subset offline mode? Yes. But we rejected that idea because it didn’t fit with our vision.”

And this is something else we’ve been meaning to mention. This notion that SimCity was born in Maxis’s womb as a permanently online, perpetually social game, is somewhat at odds with, well, Maxis’s own words from just a year ago. Back then they made it clear to the press that the internet would only be needed to boot the game, and then it could run offline after that. These straight answers seem as wobbly as the new SimCity’s roads. A game that was always intended to be so intrinsically online that no offline mode was even conceivable, except for last March, a year before the end of development, when it was.

Obviously we would still desperately love to hear from Maxis to explain the discrepancies we’ve discussed. To ask why it was repeatedly claimed that the servers were so integral for running the core game, when all people needed to do to prove otherwise was pull the ethernet cable out the back of their machine. We want to know how a game that a year ago only needed the internet to launch, is now a game that was originally conceived to be permanently online. If this is a confusion, then please do clear it up for us.

 

[Geremy Tibbles]

http://www.cinemablend.com/games/SimCity-Hack-Lets-Users-Destroy-Anyone-Online-City-Thanks-Always-DRM-53685.html

Probably soon to be fixed, but it's sort of interesting.

I think it's a little unfair to heap this sort of thing into the "reasons why always online is bad", however.

[Flynn]

OK guys I need either talking into or out of getting this game.

 

Since EA are still giving away a free game away to anyone who registers up until march 18th if I'm going to bite I may as well do so now.

 

I have been sitting on the fence pretty much since launch day looking at the game and thinking "boy it looks really contrived at times, and there's are a lot of flaws to this thing", but at the same time I'm thinking "they seem really interesting flaws, I want to play around with the game and see if I can get it to do weird stuff"

 

I'm not hearing the cries of woe that I used to on twitter so i guess the servers are at least somewhat stable.

 

So gentlemen who have already bought the game, if i go in expecting something flawed but interesting should I be able to enjoy it?

 

(my indecision isn't being helped by the fact Anno 2070 is on sale on steam for 1/4 the cost of Simcity)

 

With the bolded part, go for it, that's exactly the attitude I have and I have enjoyed the heck out of it.  Also... SO PRETTY.

 

I have also been impressed by how active numerous SimCity devs have been on twitter -- responding directly to complaints and bug reports.

 

I wouldn't count on much for the free game though, it's probably a 'pick 1 of 3' of a bunch of older games.   

 

Anno 2070 is a good game but it doesn't play much like SimCity and doesn't hit the same spot.

[brkl]

Man, I'm annoyed at the streetcars. Why the heck do you need the wide avenues for streetcars? You can fit one anywhere you can fit a pair of tracks. I just moved to Helsinki a week ago and they've laid streetcar tracks on any street that's convenient.

[Thrik]

One thing I'm finding really difficult to figure out from the feedback is whether or not this is actually a step forwards for SimCity as a game. I know it looks great and that alone is a big draw, but everything being said about the actual gameplay indicates that it's no better than SimCity 4 in terms of simulation, possibilities, etc — and in some cases is even a significant step backwards. I guess this comes from SC4 being the culmination of years of similar sequels, refined to the absolute best Maxis could achieve using the old template. This on the other hand is a whole new platform for the series, that could be the foundation for a number of fantastic sequels but doesn't seem quite there yet.

 

I've noticed that a lot of people who largely like the game are still tiring of it and moving on to other games relatively quickly. I'm probably going to get it but I'll be very sad if I feel like I've pretty much exhausted it after 10 hours or whatever.

[brkl]

It's almost certainly not better as a city simulator. It's really weird -- you have to specialize the "cities", so you start jumping from one to another, and other ones are frozen when you do. So if you have one city making money, you jump to that and wait, donate the money to a poor city and then jump back exactly where you left. It really doesn't feel like it portrays the real world in how it operates, but it's pretty and you can make curvy roads (which will cause annoying problems).

[Sno]

That's part of what i hated about the regions in Sim City 4.

The idea that you didn't really have to create functional, sustainable cities.

You just needed to force it to the point where it can serve the function you need it to serve, and it doesn't matter how unstable it is, because it's locked in time once you go back to another city where you can start reaping the rewards from it.

[Dewar]

My experience is that it will work fine for a while, then completely stop working. So you will be depending on electricity from another city, then suddenly that connection will "break" and you'll be out of power. Or you will send money from one city to another, only to see that money disappear into the aether. Or you will build a city hall module, but that module will not properly unlock in other cities in the region; eventually it may unlock, only to re-lock. So the online connectivity has been very sporadic for me. I also have been basically unable to join truly multiplayer games (because for me the region browser will only display full regions); these were all experiences I had while running multiple cities in the same region. 

 

Because of all of these problems, I've pretty much given up attempting to use the regional features. Thus for me, the game has been single-player only. The authorial intent may have been that the game be multiplayer, but that's not how I experience it. I am enjoying the game without the multiplayer, so at least for me the multiplayer is not integral to the experience. And I actually suspect far more people are playing basically singleplayer than they are multiplayer, at least so far. 

 

Just so you don't feel alone, this has been my experience as well. Tourism has been especially frustrating, with casino attendance suddenly dropping to zero and leaving me way in the red, then spiking up high again for no reason.

 

I've pretty much given up this game for the moment, at least for a couple of patches. The combo between these problems and traffic issues just makes the game unplayable at some point. I still think it was worth the $40 I paid, not so sure if it would be work $60 to me.

[Nappi]

Maxis is offering a functioning city simulator for free by way of an apology:

 

http://www.polygon.com/2013/3/18/4119328/simcity-free-game-origin

[Dewar]

Well, I was thinking about getting ME3 of PC to play online with friends (I already have the xbox version) but I wasn't going to pay for it. I guess this is a good chance to get it free.

 

Edit: Deadspace 3 is also tempting, but I hear it gets pretty lousy toward the end.