You know how the industry keeps labeling people "entitled" whenever they take any issue whatsoever with what it's doing? Well this form of always on DRM that Sim City is using - you know, the reason why many who bought the game can't play it at this moment - is an example of why people take umbrage.
Everyone understands that companies have the right to, and a need to, protect their property as well as do the best they can to ensure sales. That's normal, expected, and accepted. But when you pay for a game, you ARE "entitled" to be allowed to play said game. Especially when their own people not 24 hours earlier go into interviews and talk about how the servers have been stress tested and are ready for launch. Those interviews aren't just innocent, excusable interactions with fans and media personnel. They're ADVERTISING.
When you advertise that your servers are ready for launch, and people pay for the game partially on the basis of that advertisement, they ARE "entitled" to get what they think they paid for. This is why always-on DRM gets such a bad rap, and why people don't understand and don't accept being called "entitled whiners" by the industry they love and want to support in exchange for gaming experiences they desire.
Meanwhile, pirates manage to crack these forms of DRM in short order. So it doesn't do a lot to deter piracy, and only really causes an inconvenience for paying customers. If it's not going to deter piracy more than an activation key, then why not take a hint from companies like Stardock, and just use activation keys? Stardock's philosophy seems to be that more intrusive forms of DRM don't protect them more than activation keys do, and they *shock and gasp* would rather not INCONVENIENCE THEIR PAYING CUSTOMERS. I know. What a radical concept, right?
That's why they get the kind of loyalty that ensures that many will ride out buggy launches like Elemental, and still be around when they finally fix the game and release something like Elemental: Fallen Enchantress. And they are only one example of companies who treat their customers right and get their loyalty in return. EA: please take note.
This is why I refused to buy this game, and Sim City was one of the main reasons (along with Civ 1) I bought by first "IBM compatible" PC well over 20 years ago.
I don't mind some online requirement, to register the game and get updates. Or for a multi-player game. Heck, the vast majority of my game collection is on Steam these days. At least my Steam games, most I can play offline no problem. Heck, some like say some Paradox games I don't even need Steam running to play it. Having said that I will be looking more and more to GOG for DRM free versions of the games I've backed on Kickstarter.
But you know what, I can still play SC 2000 some 20 years later and it runs great. Sim City 5? I highly doubt it since you know EA will kill the servers certainly within a decade if not much sooner once sales lag. And then what do you have? You paid $60+ for a game you can no longer play. What a great scam.
I swore off EA and Ubi long ago for this crap and I really wish the zombiefied gamer public would finally wake up and quit buying these games that are so anti-consumer it's not even funny.
Off my soapbox....
Let's not forget about the inability to mod it, as well. That idea is going to go down about as well as it did for Diablo 3, perhaps still worse, since city sims seem to gather more modders then action titles. You get small cities, no mods, and an inability to play offline for any reasonable period of time, if you enjoy singleplayer (as I do). Great idea, indeed.
EDIT: I just noticed on Metacritic how many European magazines have gushed over Simcity 5 with the usual hype that must require washing their hands, and shorts, after finishing their reviews. No mention at all is made in many cases of the various issues that have raised plenty of attention. Apparently, they don't exist.
Kudos to Giant Bomb, then. I don't usually like their reviews at all, but this one is unusually thoughtful, and I think catches what the developers intended, while pointing out why it wouldn't work on the Simcity frame. A brief quote:
'It is therefore difficult to completely reconcile a game like SimCity. This is a game with startling clarity of vision, but that vision often feels narrow and intractable. It knows precisely what it wants to be, and in most key ways, executes on those ideas with precision. But in setting that course, it all but dismisses the way in which many played SimCity sequel after sequel. And while I expect many will fall head-over-heels in love with this SimCity's cooperative design, at its best, the game feels more like a really thoughtfully designed multiplayer mode for a larger, single-player capable game that, sadly, doesn't exist. Go in with the right expectations, and there's a good chance you'll enjoy your time with SimCity. Assuming, of course, EA's servers will let you play it in the first place."
LOL. Love it. GOG had similar tweets about SC 2000 which they put on sale.
I am not going to defend EA. They completely f-ed up. They made an internet-enabled (er.. required) game without establishing a basic competence or understanding of that medium. Predictably, as soon as their servers saw significant loads the game stopped working and EA/Maxis was caught with their pants down.
It's not, as many have surmised, an issue of not having enough "servers" to handle the load (Simcity is hosted on AWS -- so scaling is a matter of clicking the mouse). The problem is clearly something in their server code, something not revealed (or not addressed) by their flawed beta tests. It's a shame that their network architecture didn't receive the same attention to detail as went into the city simulator.
I do believe EA is frantically working at this. They are getting hammered in the press (check out the reviews on Amazon) and that's real money so they need this fixed as much as we want it fixed. But IMHO, their issues involve huge rewrites of crucial sections of code. Yeah, they're burning the midnight oil now (and possibly making things worse), but fixing this stuff takes time.
They'll likely get it sorted in the next two weeks or so.
However, I have managed, by the grace of the gods of the internet (and European West 2), to spend ~10 hours playing the game and I have two things to say:
1. The execution of the basic Simcity game (once you get on) is utterly flawless. The game is fun, it's beautiful, it has a great learning curve, and provides a bevy of options and challenges and incredibly open-ended and rewarding game-play.
2. The incorporation of the region view is really slick and is a killer feature. Sharing a region with friends, getting to look at their city as it hums along, coordinating your strategies and watching the cities grow is (so far) really really cool. That wouldn't really be possible without the constant-connection requirement.
None of this excuses the disaster that is the Simcity 2013 release. If you, like me, can no longer even log in, it's egregiously bad. It's appalling. And it makes the problems with WoM here at Stardock seem quite insignificant by contrast. Sure simcity, the game, is a hell of lot more polished and fun than WoM was, but at least we could play WoM.
Should there be an offline mode for Simcity 2013? Yes. Just like there should be multiplayer for FE. I doubt we'll ever see either.
Frogboy said in a recent post that network code specialists are sparse and they are looking to recruit so they can do FE in co-op. But apparently there are not many network code specialists around at the moment (or willing to move to Michigan ).
I have no doubt that there's a great game hiding behind all of this. But it doesn't excuse the fact that the people who most support these companies - those who preorder - suffer most from things like this. And that seems ass backwards to me.
So far at least, the industry at large is being honest and calling them out. This marks a change. Perhaps they've finally gone too far? They're not getting the same free pass that Diablo III largely did. Sites are going so far as to encourage people not to buy the game, and Amazon has stopped selling the digital download.
This might sound a little melodramatic, but I was legitimately somewhat heartbroken earlier reading a comment on IGN. This person had never played a Sim City game or, indeed, any sort of PC-centric city management or economic sim before. He was able to sign in and became utterly engrossed in the game. I would like to think that he had a magical and defining experience like we did the first time we played a game like this. But instead he came away concluding that he would NEVER play a game like this again. Because no matter how fun it was, he lost all of his progress due to these server issues. Because we can't save locally.
We can say that's an overreaction, but we forget that there are new, young gamers coming to the PC as a platform for the first time, who will be turned off by this. That's a damn shame.
Not to argue, but I'm curious whom you define as the industry. When I checked Metacritic yesterday, ten of fifteen critics' reviews were in the slavering range. Only five were less. The reviewers appear to regard it as the greatest game in the universe, only to be replaced by the next greatest game in the universe which will satisfy their editors. I'm seeing next to no mention in most of these reviews of city size issues, lack of modding, or even the fact that singleplayer requires near-constant connection to the Web. If someone in the games industry is calling EA out for all this, it's happening on a very individual basis, and doesn't appear representative of the whole.
He's pissed off, and understandably so. What he's really saying is that he got conned by PR. With any luck, the next time PR comes along, he (or she) will think twice about buying into the message. Unfortunately, most of us don't, because the message really gets into our feelings. Selling products is a a more sophisticated process than making them: ask anybody involved in data mining and analysis.
Well, it's amazing how things are changing. Maybe this is one thing that will change... for the better.
Everyone is screaming about the online problems of SimCity, and many claime that the core game is great. Have we all forgotten the size of the cities. They are tiny, its not SimCity as we know it, even if the always online didnt have any problems.
One idea- unsure if it would help, but look at GGPO. I wonder if that could be translated from fighting games to other genres. It would be cheap netcode to license as well.
If you don't like it than don't play it. That means bought or pirated. Don't buy it and give them money, or pirate it and give them the obvious excuse of 'if they couldn't pirate it they would buy it.' Leave it alone and show them they're product isn't wanted. It's the only way. Bitching and moaning does absolutely nothing.
I believe it's called discussion: eliciting facts and examining conditions that result from an act, considering possible motivations, and potential fallout.
If that includes gloating, hey, bonus.
I have a netbook which has had Steam in offline mode since I updated SoaSE:R to v1.1. It has also gone through multiple reboots without having to ever had to let Steam go online; I always hit stay in offline mode when Steam starts after logging in, and have not had any issue with that.
On a related note, with regards to SoaSE:R, I've found that I can launch Sins the moment I open Steam, i.e. while it's in the process of booting up/logging me in, without issue.
General replies to several people since I'm not at my regular PC and quoting is tough at the moment.
By "industry" I meant big names like IGN and Kotaku. Both have essentially recommended that people not buy the game at this point. IGN is the largest gaming site on the net (for better or worse, love them or hate them) and is owned by Ziff Davis who own... well... almost everyone else. That said, you're right that a lot of reviewers aren't mentioning these issues. But most big review sites seem to be, which is more than could be said for Diablo III for instance. It's something at least. Perhaps the last vestiges of my idealistic optimism that life hasn't successfully jaded away into nihilistic cynicism is showing when I say the industry isn't giving the game a free pass. But I would like to think this is progress, at least.
As for complaining not solving anything, I completely agree that the only message people can send EA is to not buy the game. But the whole "don't complain because it does nothing" argument is one I pretty much reject. If something happens and I dislike it, I'm going to speak up about it. And if it's something as egregious as a thing I passionately love transforming gradually over time into something I don't (especially when I've predicted and warned about it for years, no one listened, and it happened,) then I'm definitely going to speak up about it. And this isn't the first or last time I will.
There's no negative consequence for expression and discussion, as long as it doesn't become trolling. Which is something I don't do. I don't play competitive internet ego games, as I call them. I'm just here to honestly speak my mind and say how I feel. If people are bothered by it or simply disagree, that's their prerogative.
I'm not sure why this is a surprise to anyone. After the Assassin's Creed II debacle, why in the hell does anyone keep paying for this crap? Seriously, why -- you, the person who went out and bought it -- why? What made you think always-on DRM deserves another chance?
Gamespot just generously gave SC5 a 5.0 score. That's generous in my book, because they gave War of Magic a 4.0. While, yes, War of Magic was a disaster, at least you could actually play it at launch, even if it was full of bugs. Why does SimCity get a score at all when so many who bought it cannot even play it? If EA goes out of business, no one will be allowed to play the game ever again ... but they still get to keep your money.
I must admit I myself have been a die-hard fanboi of several gaming franchises, the two chief among them Civilization and SimCity. Fortunately, I learned my lesson with Civilization V which is still a major disappointment; I regret having purchased it ... at least it was playable, but still a disappointment. The moment I read that SC5 will require a constant connection to their server, I stopped reading there. I don't know if SimCity can be salvaged for its next iteration, or if this fail will be as deadly to the series as Master of Orion III was.
Seriously, who bought it and expected anything different? Did you never hear about the Assassin's Creed II and other always-on DRM debacles?
I went out and bought it and already played over twelve hours worth so far.
It's a fantastic game, and once the server issues clear up it'll be less about the anti DRM diatribe everyone's going on about and more about the actual content of the game.
You are not stressed about the small cities? Great for you
It is a nice break from the same design philosophy in my opinion.
I do miss the giant cities though.
There is "modding" (could get back original size) in this game supposibly but I don't see how this works with this Always Online Server Side Calculation nonsense they are spewwing out.
My impression, based on everything I've read, was that modding was completely out. If by modding we're using the term as it's generally used: extensive changes to code implemented by users. If you just mean changing something in an INI file, sort of like flipping a switch, that's not modding.
Assuming 300k per city (I don't know what the actual max is) and 16 cities per region (which is more like a real city anyway) that's 4.8 million, right?
Doesn't seem all that small.
Wow. EA is now asking its affiliates to CEASE MARKETING for the game, and saying that it will inform them when active marketing should resume.
http://www.polygon.com/2013/3/8/4079894/ea-suspends-simcity-marketing-campaigns-asks-affiliates-to-stop
"Please stop actively promoting the game." Has this ever happened before?
Brilliant!
When will more companies learn to freaking load test properly BEFORE their launch. From what I've seen they are hosting with AWS, so it's a matter of poor IaaS design or more likely just trying to go on the cheap and buy the least amount of server resources possible. There really is no excuse for that, as their hosting can be purchased on an hourly basis, go ahead and buy more than you think you need, then quickly scale back if demand is less than forcasted.
Since they still have distinct "servers", It seems likely they simply didn't design the system such that it could scale linearly with additional resources (shared bottleneck among all servers, etc), or that they have considerable manual setup involved with spinning up new instances. So the hosted infrastructure means squat all for anything but the more general Origin/activation components.
The gaming press is really starting to get riled up. And some are starting to lower their review scores too.
As for small cities. Don't you already see this as a DLC? Pay $20! Now have bigger cities!! Oh..and subways will be in the next DLC! We love bending over our customers!
I really don't get why anyone still does business with these people. I'm to the point where I'm getting all my games on Kickstarter.
Between Project Eternity, Dreamfall, Wasteland 2, Star Citizen, Torment and Lord British I think my next 2-3 years of gaming is pretty booked. 2014 is looking to be a banner year for PC gaming. Who needs EA and their crap?
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