SimCity (2013) Dear God...

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I love The Sims, I know, this topic was just justified, but.. dear Lord. This game is a disaster.

 

This game is just simply a nightmare. There are so many problems with it and so many horrible things and unspeakable horrors and it's just.. hard to watch. SimCity 5 as I'll call it here is the 5th major game in the SimCity series. You build a city. You watch it grow from mere dust. Sims will move in. You build services for them, houses, industry, and watch them all and hope a fire doesn't break out near Auburn. It's SimCity. SimCity hasn't had a major release since 2003. So a lot of people were hyped. This time around, Maxis (Emeryville) used a "wonderful" new engine dubbed GlassBox. It was advertised that with GlassBox every Sim had a distinct personality and they had their own homes, etc. People cautioned the use of always-online DRM, which has also been used in games like Diablo II (to mass failure). But people were excited. They were hyped. 

 

And they were duped. Soooooooo duped.

 

I haven't played the game. Probably never will. But just by looking at this you know you were kind of doomed from the very start. The always-online DRM, of course, broke the game - servers were just absolute Hell when they first launched - you go offline, your game will go bye-bye in the next 5 minutes. EAxis had to literally disable features of the game to get the servers up and running (achievements and the like) and even then they went down very often. The launch was just plain awful. Surprisingly, EA's "Server Status" at the SimCity website shows all servers as "playable" for the moment. I'd rather set up my regions on the Antarctica server or donate my copies to the penguins I know down the road.

 

Oh, and the GlassBox engine is pretty bad. EAxis advertised the whole "GlassBox" engine and how it was capable of so much and how all the Sims would have their own little lives. Oh... boy. Just.. oh.

 

Kotaku has found some wonderful little videos about this situation:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WH-CdkSqDSs&feature

Instead of returning to their own ''homes'', Sims instead return to the nearest house available.

Sims will always take the shortest path to their destination available - leading to mass congestion.

 

SimCity 5's Sims actually use the same A.I as the sewage/water processes. Joy. 

 

Oh, and Lucy Bradshaw, Maxis general manager, and the executive producer of The Sims 2 (A fun game it was, best-selling game ever, although THAT was also quite buggy), has kind of shot-down any hope for a while that SimCity 5 will have some sort of an offline mode or a single-player mode. Yay.

 

You've probably heard about this game and it's horrible mechanics - it's all over the Internet.

 

I guess all giants must fall. (Then again, Streets Of SimCity was kind of blegh.. foreshadowing?)

[Macseed]

[sbl]

All the servers kept going down, there wasn't offline mode.