If they had called this Sim City Online and marketed as not the next Sim City, but more of an MMO like Ever Quest, Guild Wars, and Star Wars Galaxies would be people be complaining as much if they knew they had to be online to play it.
Sim City 4, 2000, and the original still run perfect and are extremely fun to play. Sim City 4 is on Steam even making it easy to get right now. I'm tempted to pick that up since I have not played it. I loved the original and 2000 though.
In another discussion on hn, someone was basically saying "no one acts so surprised when you can't access Facebook if your internet connection is down, why are they so ticked off here?" I'd argue that it's because most people have a reasonable expectation that a locally-installed, single-player game should work regardless of connectivity.
There may be potentially valid technical reasons why SimCity might need or even want a persistent connection, but you absolutely need to call that out.
With EA's record of shutting down still-active servers for the multi-player portions of games that were just a few years old, I would be very reticent to buy an EA product that required a server even for single-player mode.
Yeah I agree, how can a mega billion company like EA fail so badly on marketing. Strategy should've been simple:
1) release it as sim city online, with marketing emphasizing it's like a sim city mmo. People will be more tolerant of launch network issues. Make lots of $$$
2) later release single player sim city 5 (just rip out online parts from above) make more $$$
The problem is that, realistically, "SimCity Online" would have bombed. City-building isn't a co-op game, and SimCity customers are not co-op gamers. CitiesXL tried to market itself as that, and it bombed, so now they de-emphasize the online aspects.
The ugly truth remains the same: this game is "social" just as an excuse to implement hardcore DRM. Sugar-coating.
The game honestly works quite well if you do think of it as a co-op game. A real life friend made a region, and I founded a city in his region.
You can do things like:
- volunteer excess services such as fire trucks, police cars, trash pickup, recycling trucks. The last one there can be lucrative if you use the raw materials you collect to build processors.
- buy water/power/etc utility capacity on an as-needed basis. Instead of having a brownout if your city grows but you forgot to scale up your electricity production, it'll just buy some automatically from other cities in the region
- town hall upgrade modules, such as the "department of transportation" which allows more transit options (train/ferry), "department of education" that allows colleges and universities, etc are shared with the region. Each time you level up your city hall you are allowed to add one of the department modules. Eventually you get to a point where you need over 290k citizens, but want some of the upgrades from a department you haven't built yet. A neighboring city can build those departments to help you out.
- After spending a bunch of money on university research and applying for a great works project, cities can contribute the resources needed to build these large scale products, and all the cities in the region benefit. Great works projects are things like a major airport, a huge solar collector (the size of a city), a space program, etc. Some bring tourists, some provide resources, etc.
The game is extremely social, but if you'd like you can ignore it. I'm in agreement with everyone here that if you want to ignore the social and play offline, you should be able to.
CitiesXL bombed because it's awfully made and incredibly painful to play from a gameplay standpoint. It's sure gorgeous, but doesn't hold a candle to even Sim City 4 in terms of fun.
So what would make it different from a regular SimCity game? The fact that it has the word online after it? That's a weak argument at best. They from the start called it a new game, not a sequel, and its been known for a long time that it would have the always-on component.
The game was never meant to be a sequel. That's why it's calls SimCity and not SimCity 5. People just decide to interpret it as such even if its not.
No I'm questioning why you are saying they should have come up with a different name like SimCity Online and start afresh when they did just that... But with the normal SimCity name. Maybe I didn't word it well, I'm running on 2 hours of sleep.
Because there's a semantic difference between "SimCity" and "SimCity Online."
SimCity's been a single-player offline experience since its inception. It's reasonable to believe in a vacuum that a newly-released "SimCity" game will be the same.
Lots of people are in such a vacuum -- a LOT of people hear "A new SimCity game is coming out / has come out" in their periphery and, having enjoyed its past iterations, rush to buy the new copy. Their surprise in finding that it's an entirely online experience is reasonable here.
Calling it "SimCity Online" could have dampened this effect, causing some -- if not a lot -- of people to stop and think "Wait, what makes it Online? Oh, it's more like an MMO."
I'm sure they had discussions about whether they should have called it "SimCity Online." I think they made the wrong decision, but maybe they thought that people would assume "online == free-to-play."
They could still have all these social/online features and not require internet-DRM to play.
You play your game, and if you want to do something social and the servers are down -- it sucks, but you can still play, and take part in the social stuff when it is up and working.
For online saves -- there is a local backup for when the online system is down.
These are not difficult things. They are just trying to fight an ever-losing battle against piracy.
Diablo III has shown that it's not an ever-losing battle, as unfortunate as that may be for the consumer caught in the middle in the foreseeable future.
If you want to play 2000, GOG.com has it for 6 bucks. Works perfectly on my mac, and I love playing it while offline on my long train ride. It's a shame, since when I am offline is the only time I play games, that I won't get to play the new one...
Sim City 4 is (still) superb. However, you will likely want to mod it to get the most out of it. There are also a lot of pointlessly finicky things in terms of maintaining a good budget.. enough so that I just enable a cheat for tons of money and forget about budgeting altogether (since the rest of the game is so deep, skipping financial worries loses you little and gains you a lot).
I grabbed it on Steam last year after losing my hard copy some years ago. If one waits for a big Steam sale or adds Sim City 4 to their wish list, they get notified when it goes on sale and the typical price is 4.99 with all the addons as well. Lots of community mods out there for the game for anyone interested that fix some bugs like traffic issues.
Yeah I just loaded SimCity 4 onto my wifes Eee PC over the network and it runs fine (not even ridiculously low settings).
SimCity games were always able to hit the casual gamer, you never needed a hardcore gaming PC to play. Why SimCity 5 needs things processed server side is just for the sake of bullshit DRM.
The only way for EA to recover from this will be to release it DRM free (or at most with the serial key DRM of days gone), otherwise SimCity 5 won't even be remembered beyond the news articles of 2013. As an avid SimCity player I can recall every game, I'll never recall SimCity 5 as at this point I'll never get to play it.
> As an avid SimCity player I can recall every game, I'll never recall SimCity 5 as at this point I'll never get to play it.
Likewise :)
Played all the Sim City games all the way back to Sim City Classic (though I played it on SNES). Played the rest on PC and also rebought Sim City 2k on gog.com a while ago for nostalgia. Even my brothers, who I would only consider casual gamers were always able to play them without a problem.
I'll never touch Sim City 5 though unless it comes to Steam and without the always online DRM.
Steam requires authentication with their servers, and that authentication is cache-able for offline access, for a period up to a month before requiring reauthentication.
It is DRM, but I don't find it to be onerous.
Individual publishers may add additional DRM measures, at their option. Those can sometimes be painful, but are clearly stated on the steam store page for each piece of software.
Additional DRM measures are usually stated, but sometimes things are omitted or notifications not removed when the additional DRM gets removed. I've bought a few games before that said they still had the DRM, but they no longer did (things like secure rom, games for windows live, etc).
I'm always paranoid and check both the Big Steam DRM List[1] and also the Steam Forums to make sure there isn't any additional DRM not listed. Especially since refunds are hard to deal with on Steam.
Sim City 4, 2000, and the original still run perfect and are extremely fun to play. Sim City 4 is on Steam even making it easy to get right now. I'm tempted to pick that up since I have not played it. I loved the original and 2000 though.