Sim City 5

[Homerboy]

For the $20 I paid for it, well worth it.

I just can't get past the limited size of the cities. I can cover the enter space in less than 30mins of play then I'm left babysitting it it to help each area grow to it's fullest density. But you can't make "areas". I dunno. I have really mixed emotions in it.

 

[mmntech]

It's finally getting a proper offline mode as well as local saves. You know, after Maxis said that was impossible.
http://kotaku.com/an-offline-mode-is-coming-to-simcity-maxis-just-announ-1500159115
http://www.simcity.com/en_US/blog/article/simcity-offline-is-coming

I didn't see a date for it in the article. They're also adding modding to the game.

 

[redrider4life4]

After every "patch" they said they fixed stuff my city has been broken. I started a 16 plot map and all my cities were perfect (only 3 spots filled), I was making hundreds of millions of Simoleans and then once I finished the 1M population Arcology the traffic just went to hell and the highways were completely backed up.

It really wasn't even fun to play after a few youtube vids came out of people making all residential cities and them actually working. Not really sure if this was fixed/addressed, but overall wish I had my $80 back.

 

[BrightCandle]

I got what I wanted out of the game, but so many things remain broken its kind of sad to see. The game had a lot of potential ruined by an enormous list of bugs, it literally should have been released a year after when it was, the core mechanics just need work.

Finally adding single player after all this time is just sad as well. They blew the game up, killed their reputation and annoyed their customers to ship a seriously broken game that in many countries got governments talking about curbs on digital licencing so that customers could return them. That is how bad this game was, it made national news the world over how broken this game was, and honestly still is.

 

[tokie]

I got 20 hours out of the game, and I was someone who pre-ordered for $60.

I feel mighty ripped off to be honest.

 

[SpatiallyAware]

I got 20 hours out of the game, and I was someone who pre-ordered for $60.

I feel mighty ripped off to be honest.

The most insulting part is how they were creating $$ DLC, even branded by marketing companies, while ignoring MAJOR playability flaws with the game.


It also completely reinforced the fact that EA has paid shills, both on EA forums and spread around on other forums.

We had people in this thread claiming to have hours and hours of playtime during periods when literally every server was down. It's just ridiculous. I've sworn off EA due to the way it was handled. They ruined such a strong franchise.. Sad.

 

[SpatiallyAware]

After every "patch" they said they fixed stuff my city has been broken. I started a 16 plot map and all my cities were perfect (only 3 spots filled), I was making hundreds of millions of Simoleans and then once I finished the 1M population Arcology the traffic just went to hell and the highways were completely backed up.

It really wasn't even fun to play after a few youtube vids came out of people making all residential cities and them actually working. Not really sure if this was fixed/addressed, but overall wish I had my $80 back.

I quit playing after losing numerous cities with 10+ hours into each one.

It was like a punch to the stomach, to invest that much time into a city just to have it disappear or become unloadable after an update. What's the point of becoming emotionally invested in a city, just to lose it due to EA's screw up?

It made the game where I would go into it knowing the city would likely be lost. It's tough to get involved in this type of game when you wonder when the save will no longer load.

 

[SpatiallyAware]

Thanks will grab a copy. What scares me is that it looks like EA will be making tons of expansions for this game. I'll assume this game is OK on its own.

All of the other sim city franchises revolved around the dynamics of balancing a city.... Adjusting police/fire, monitoring water supplies, dealing with disasters, it was a very rewarding and varied experience.

This latest sim city is basically all about making traffic work. Honestly 'sim traffic simulator' would be a better description.

The last traffic update did help somewhat, but then it turns the game into being only about selling resources to make money. There really isn't a "city mayor" type of feel to the game, it's more like a finance game.

To me, most of the game dynamic issues revolve around TINY city spaces. When you have no way to sprawl out your city it makes it tough to develop and change since one of your main focuses has to be about maximizing density within a tiny area.

 

[Sohaltang]

I waited until I caught a sale with a stacked coupon code. Paid 14$ for it. Played about 5 hours and have not touched it since. The old Sim city games sucked away hundreds of hours of my life. Can't believe this game is soooooo bad

 

[abj13]

To me, most of the game dynamic issues revolve around TINY city spaces. When you have no way to sprawl out your city it makes it tough to develop and change since one of your main focuses has to be about maximizing density within a tiny area.

This is what I don't get about the production of this game. From what I've read, this game is written for a single core, single threaded. There had to be SOMEBODY during the alpha phase that said "Hey, these city plots are tiny as heck, people aren't going to like that." And nobody felt the idea of trying to redirect development into utilizing hardware that most gamers have? Yes, I get it, its not that easy to write multicore/multithreaded games. But were they really that full of themselves they would believe players would be happy with a SimTown (or really this game was what Simsville from 10+ years ago was) instead of Simcity? Apparently so.

That's what so disappointing about this game. The concerns about city size were there before the game was ever released. One has to imagine other people within the development team raised this issue too. Yet in the end, decisions like that went long ways into making a crappy game (ontop of all the bugs and horrible server issues).

Maxis wants to whine how they can't make the city plots bigger, its because they made moronic decisions about the general coding of the game. Glassbox probably could be able to simulate large populations with multicores/multithreads, but nobody will know since that entire issue has been swept under the rug.

I really hope this series doesn't end up in the dustbin like Master of Orion or heck the Total War series is heading. So many classic series being ruined by shoddy development. It is downright sad what the industry has produced.

 

[SpatiallyAware]

It's stereotypical EA. They already programmed the game, they don't care about the franchise, and to them it's not worth rewriting the code. It's incredibly typical EA-style business decisions.

 

[Wyndru]

It would have been easy to develop this game to be successful. Even SC4 still has a huge amount of fans and addon writers who basically fixed many of the flaws in that game. They could have just improved on that game, kept similar simulation logic and just made the graphics nicer (and full 3d).

This was a no-brainer for EA and they screwed it up somehow.

 

[KentState]

Between this and BF4, EA had a hand in screwing up two franchises in a single year. I believe that they set some type of record of game related lawsuits.

 

[loganone]

Hopefully theres another developer out there who sees the huge demand for a proper city builder that isn't a glorified Facebook game.

 

[lupi]

I waited until I caught a sale with a stacked coupon code. Paid 14$ for it. Played about 5 hours and have not touched it since. The old Sim city games sucked away hundreds of hours of my life. Can't believe this game is soooooo bad

should have listened to us who said it'd be a good deal at $5 with all the dlc bundled in

 

[mmntech]

I still can't get over the DRM and cloud saves thing though. It's certainly not ideal and I'll likely pass until it inevitably gets patched out.

My little bit of foreshadowing from before it launched. I still haven't bought it and likely never will unless they were giving it away for free.

I don't really blame Maxis for this fiasco. Their programmers and artists worked their butts off had good vision for the game. It just ultimately got bogged down in bureaucracy.

As I've said before, this is what happens when you have suits without creative backgrounds making creative decisions. The server issues were really just the icing on the diarrhoea sundae. The real issue is they released a horribly broken game bogged down by pointless DRM, and legitimately expected the public to act as beta tester. It's not the first time EA has done this and it certainly won't be the last.

2013 though, it hasn't been a good year for them. They released two big budget that should have been runaway hits, that were ruined by poor quality control and bad business decisions. Their investors are starting to take notice and are getting angry. Hopefully this will generate some meaningful changes in leadership. Harvard MBAs can't/don't know how to run businesses like this. You have to have someone at the helm that knows the industry and preferably has experience on the production side.

 

[MichaelBarg]

I don't really blame Maxis for this fiasco. Their programmers and artists worked their butts off had good vision for the game. It just ultimately got bogged down in bureaucracy.
/QUOTE]

I disagree. Most interviews with developers that I've seen suggest that they made the game they envisioned, except that it had some major bugs. The regional economy, small cities, deep reliance on trade with other cities in the region, resource sharing, minimizing much of the city management like power and water, the building industries and making your city work around them like a Sim Company Town... that was their vision. If it worked, it might even be a decent game. But it's not what anyone asked for in a new Sim City.

 

[Jeff7]

Hopefully theres another developer out there who sees the huge demand for a proper city builder that isn't a glorified Facebook game.

That's where the big money is though. You've got simplistic 2D Flash-type games that are generating absurd amounts of revenue, and whatever "things" Facebook is throwing out there.
And you've got a large number of people who don't want to deal with anything like a 368-page strategy guide, which was really more of a user manual for the game. Add in that developers seem to be making game to be easy, to avoid any shareholder-unfriendly online complaints of games being difficult or unfair. You can't do "Find the red key" or "Take out the snipers" without giant glowing arrows telling you exactly what to do; and no deviating from the straight and narrow path. ("You can't go there! The radiation will kill you! And beware of the invisible walls.")



The real "hardcore" gamer market is just a niche by comparison.

My little bit of foreshadowing from before it launched. I still haven't bought it and likely never will unless they were giving it away for free.

I don't really blame Maxis for this fiasco. Their programmers and artists worked their butts off had good vision for the game. It just ultimately got bogged down in bureaucracy.

As I've said before, this is what happens when you have suits without creative backgrounds making creative decisions. The server issues were really just the icing on the diarrhoea sundae. The real issue is they released a horribly broken game bogged down by pointless DRM, and legitimately expected the public to act as beta tester. It's not the first time EA has done this and it certainly won't be the last.

2013 though, it hasn't been a good year for them. They released two big budget that should have been runaway hits, that were ruined by poor quality control and bad business decisions. Their investors are starting to take notice and are getting angry. Hopefully this will generate some meaningful changes in leadership. Harvard MBAs can't/don't know how to run businesses like this. You have to have someone at the helm that knows the industry and preferably has experience on the production side.

Nah, you're not thinking about it correctly. You need to focus on short-term profits and low-hanging fruit, even if it means driving the company into the ground.

 

[Skel]

I don't really blame Maxis for this fiasco. Their programmers and artists worked their butts off had good vision for the game. It just ultimately got bogged down in bureaucracy.
/QUOTE]

I disagree. Most interviews with developers that I've seen suggest that they made the game they envisioned, except that it had some major bugs. The regional economy, small cities, deep reliance on trade with other cities in the region, resource sharing, minimizing much of the city management like power and water, the building industries and making your city work around them like a Sim Company Town... that was their vision. If it worked, it might even be a decent game. But it's not what anyone asked for in a new Sim City.

I always felt the same way.. while it's really easy to blame EA for everything, I remembered all the videos leading up to the launch. It really does look like they wanted the kind of game we got. Either way, the ball was dropped all the way around and my preorder was a huge mistake.

 

[lupi]

think you're giving too much credit to maxis, they still made the game with ridiculous small city sizes which beyond the online only crap is one of the biggest fundamental problem with the game.

 

[Alevian]

game brings back so many memories

 

[BrightCandle]

Maxis are the ones that defended all the choices they made. The evidence points to them being responsible for it all.

 

[Ancalagon44]

All those who are still bitching about Sim City 5 - if you bought it, you only have yourself to blame. Dont come crying when you knew it would have always online DRM in it.

 

[Sulaco]

Maxis are the ones that defended all the choices they made. The evidence points to them being responsible for it all.

You have to wonder though how much of that "defense" was sincere and legitimate, and how much of it was lip service to the execs pulling holding the purse strings and nagging about DRM and piracy.

I don't believe EA just gave them carte blanche to make these calls, and Maxis just happened to think this all up themselves.
If they did, though, they deserve what they got.

 

[CPA]

My little bit of foreshadowing from before it launched. I still haven't bought it and likely never will unless they were giving it away for free.

I don't really blame Maxis for this fiasco. Their programmers and artists worked their butts off had good vision for the game. It just ultimately got bogged down in bureaucracy.

As I've said before, this is what happens when you have suits without creative backgrounds making creative decisions. The server issues were really just the icing on the diarrhoea sundae. The real issue is they released a horribly broken game bogged down by pointless DRM, and legitimately expected the public to act as beta tester. It's not the first time EA has done this and it certainly won't be the last.

2013 though, it hasn't been a good year for them. They released two big budget that should have been runaway hits, that were ruined by poor quality control and bad business decisions. Their investors are starting to take notice and are getting angry. Hopefully this will generate some meaningful changes in leadership. Harvard MBAs can't/don't know how to run businesses like this. You have to have someone at the helm that knows the industry and preferably has experience on the production side.

Their programmers were responsible for the new traffic/citizen "simulator" mess. EA had nothing to do with that. Maxis isn't getting off the hook that easy.