I beta's this game. Disliked the limitations and especially hated the fact they wanted to charge me like an MMO when it was so... well, lacking is the best word I could come up with it. Apparently, I was not alone.
Oct to March, is this the most short lived MMO to date, maybe close (not counting the ones that never made it to retail space)?
Oh more discussions to be had on simtropolis about this, and it doesn't look like they are doing much for those people out there who actually paid their monthly fee and purchased the game either. Great news though, buses, which have been a staple in city builders since, well since at least Sim City 2000 will make it to the solo game for free~! (yes that is sarcasm, and no i never purchased the game.... just really, really wanted someone to do Sim City 5).
Did they can it already? I played it for a couple days in beta and was also very unimpressed. I have no clue what they were thinking -- they marketed the game as an MMO, but it played much more like a standalone game, and not a very good one at that. I wouldn't have played it for free, much less pay for it.
I didn't care much for the MMO component. I purchased a copy because it had a single player option, and I figured that when I have the cravings for a "Sim City" like game, I'll start it up. That hasn't happened yet so my copy remains unplayed.
So, will there still be a solo mode? Are they going to give out new content without a subscription?
The main problem is they gambled the entire game upon the (naive) hope that everyone who bought it would do the pay-per-month and then continue to play the game for multiple hours a day pretty much until the end of time. Without the multiplayer aspect, it almost seems pointless. Building a specialized city makes sense for a multiplayer game, but in solo mode it is just an extremely frustrating limitation.
Then there were the launch issues. Dunno if it has changed since (haven't played it since the week I bought it) but the trading options were laggy as all hell and I think it had a memory leak somewhere (or multiple somewheres) judging by the rate at which it slowed down over the course of the game, with the only solution being restarting the game.
I followed the game all the time it was in development, so I was bummed to hear that it stunk.
This is a game I really wanted to try, but there was no demo version when it came out. So I just moved on and forgot about it.
Note to publishers who I haven't enjoyed games from in the past. No demo = no sale. (In fact I only heard of Stardock after trying the SoaSE demo, and now I've got several Stardock games.)
There was a demo for a short time before it was released.
Yeah and it was a pain to to play the demo too. Being the kind of person I am, i put symbols in my password with them, guess what, their registery would accept passwords with symbols at sign up but reject them when you tried to login. Took them a few days to clear it up for me, and I wound up playing the demo for about 2 days before I decided no way. You've got a serious problem when you present a city simulation game and decide to leave out mass transit from solo play in hopes of forcing people to pay you per month for buses (trains and etc. weren't even in the game when they pulled the plug).
They're putting out something called Cites XL 2011 but it seems a little iffy to me.
I still believe a city builder can have a multiplayer component and be successful, but I don't think charging MMO prices for watered down content like MC did would ever be successful. What's really bad is steam and impulse and company are still selling this game like its not ending in march. Since Cities XL is one of those games that requires an online account to play, even solo mode, i am not sure if they are pulling that server too or not.
What does multiplayer city building even look like? I mean why and how would you want to interact with other people?
I am not 100% sure, but being able to trade oil and water and get mass transit certainly wasn't enough for an MMO price tag. Emperor had multiplayer trading which wasn't too bad but still a bit of a disconnect. The Settlers series always had some sort of multiplayer in it, right from the first game release in the 90s. It's kind of a city builder.
Really though I was thinking along the line of some friendly competition, liking winning bids and companies. If you are Seattle and you get Microsoft or Boeing to come into your city, then you are going to get some commuters from surrounding cities to go there but not a lot of them want to live there. It would be interesting to see if you had 2-5 people playing with cities connecting to one another how they would evolve side by side. It would never be a quick skirmish but I think a lot of city builders are very patient to play the games in the first place.
I mean Cities XL seemed to introduce an idea that I sort of liked too, cities specializing in stuff instead of just generic industry and resources which, in multiplayer, could make things intersting.
Just saying MC complete failure of this game doesn't mean that city builders can't have multiplayer; it just means you can't slap a MMO price tag on a single-player with a very weak multiplayer component.
I played the beta ages ago, but as I remember, the economic interaction was resource tokens you either generated or needed that you could trade with other cities. So you kinda played a standalone simcity game that had a chat interface and the "interaction" was trading these tokens with other cities since no one city would have everything (some were agricultural, some had fossil fuels, etc.) It wasn't that compelling of a model for a multiplayer game.
Yeah, I didn't know about it until after it closed because I wasn't watching the game very closely until release, when I wanted to try it. Then I couldn't. Never really gave it another look.
What I really want is a proper SimCity 5, or a replacement for that.
Unfortunatly, I doubt we'll ever see a Simcity 5. EA shut down most of Maxis, and knowing EA, there're likely to release another crappy spin off like Simcity Societies.
What I'd like to do is keep playing Simcity 4, but my card is so new that the modern drivers mess up the graphics. The buildings show up fine, but things that move like cars do not.
Yeah. Darn shame.
I loved Sim City 2000 and 3000. Never played SC4, and now it's too late with my advanced PC. Boy would I love to see a SC5. But yeah, there's virtually no chance for the next 10 years, IMO.
Is anyone surprised? They took out features from Simcity 4 and tried to make you pay a montly fee for it.
I'm betting most people continued playing Simcity 4.
The idea of Simcity Societies kind of reminds me about the idea of Spore. It was good but badly implemented and dumbed down to the point of hardly any fun... oh and it was not optimized at all, pretty much unplayable after playing awhile.
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