Sim City

[TheDvEight]

Screenies: http://www.pcgamer.com/previews/simcity-hands-on-preview/


Website:http://www.simcity.com/en_US/game/info/what-is-simcity




For Gromit : http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/121626-EA-Brings-Back-its-Harsh-Beta-EULA

 For Gromit: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/121673-Electronic-Arts-Changes-Confusing-SimCity-EULA

[Sharpfang]

ill be playing this

[smilodon]

I'm a big fan of the Franchise, although I'm a little worried about what DRM nonsense EA will add to the game. £34.99 from Amazon is just the right side of acceptable as well, after worrying reports about it being fifty quid!

[ArithonUK]

Allegedly the game is part operated from EA servers, so in-game calculations are carried out off your PC.

Take a moment to think just how bad an idea that is. Remember, "always on" DRM doesn't just mean your internet connection, as I found with Ass Creed2 and Ubisoft.com being down 4 days out of 5 when the game was released.

Then imagine that in twelve to eighteen months, when the 5th DLC has failed to meet sales targets, EA pull the plug. There goes your £35 in a puff of EA's cigar smoke.

I'm boycotting this game, as I want to firmly discourage this kind of "pay premium purchase price for what is a short-term subscription" sales model.

My money is now mostly going to GOG.com and Kickstarter.co.uk, where the customer's opinion matters.

[Tutonic]

It's all gone predictably, horribly wrong: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/03/05/gamers-line-up-to-play-simcity/

The fact you can grief in a Sim City game? What were these clowns thinking?

You're better off buying Sim City 2000 from GOG.com, and playing that instead.

[smilodon]

That's the end of Sim City for me then. The idea is all kinds of horrible and add in a company like EA and it's got disaster written all over it.

Sent from my GT-I9100 using Tapatalk 2

[no peanuts]

I played 2 of the beta weekends. Loved it. I pre-ordered it, Looks like I'll have to wait for official release day though, can't seem to unlock it using VPN's. Has gone live in some regions but apparently we'll have to wait until Friday :sad:

[Sharpfang]

ill keep my panties unbunched for the time being. im connected to the net 99% of time i play.
as for it doing calculations off ure computer, might not be a bad thing, as all u brits with ure
crap computers can play it too trailers look awesome, i can hardly wait!

[BrotherTobious]

Ahh the sane voice of someone on the EA payroll

[ArithonUK]

I called it.

Rock, Paper, Shotgun reports the US release of SIM City has gone badly wrong due to problems with EA servers.

Hey, want to play the freshly US-released SimCity? Well, stand in line.  As Total Biscuit reveals (video below), there are already 30 minute  queues. And this is just for those who’ve stayed up past midnight to be  able to play. In just one country.

And at this point we’re only just beginning to see the issues arising from this online entangling. Softpedia say that it’s taking up to three hours for the game to unlock due to server struggles. Kotaku are reporting that neighbouring cities can ruin your game. And Ars Technica discussing how many ways the game has let them down.

[video=youtube;RUl_Cj2_KWU]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=RUl_Cj2_KWU[/video]

[Sharpfang]

30 mins, pfft, thats nothing. anyone remember D3? took quite a while before anyone could play that too

[ArithonUK]

30 mins, pfft, thats nothing.

You're very forgiving. If I bought a lightbulb for £1 and it took 30 minutes to come on, I'd take it back to the shop as unfit for purpose.

To charge £35-£65 for a game which takes 3 hours to unlock and 30 minutes to load is pretty abysmal.

[T-Bag]

ill keep my panties unbunched for the time being. im connected to the net 99% of time i play.
as for it doing calculations off ure computer, might not be a bad thing, as all u brits with ure
crap computers can play it too trailers look awesome, i can hardly wait!

Firstly, yes you may be connected to the internet 99.99% of the time, I know I am. The point is not whether you can connect to Facebook, it's whether you can connect to the specific server where your city is located, and whether in 3-4 years time when a new version comes out they don't kill off the game. A version of Assassin's Creed had always on DRM and it would kick people to desktop every time the server glitched despite it being a single player game, and that was without external calculations.

Calculations off your computer if you are doing something complex...but this is Sim City, it's never going to be especially taxing. With a copy of Mathematica set my computer churning through Bessel functions to calculate electric fields produced by electrodes etc, that can be a computationally intensive task, I'm all for handing that to some cloud supercomputer if it needs to be done faster. If Sim City is trying that then you've completely lost the plot. If it can't run on my 4.2GHz i7 rig, or even a standard i5 then they've programmed it wrong, so they're handing off calculations simply to try and break the game for people cracking it. I've got a feeling in 3-6 months though the crackers will have got around this and will have an ultimately more stable game as a result...so it's a case of EA punishing their customers.

Basically this is a game people should avoid like the plague. It's broken by design and even if it were running fine now (which it's definitely not) there's no guarantee it'll work in a couple of years, and £35 seems like a lot for a self destructing game.

[Tutonic]

Their most heinous crime isn't the DRM (which is pretty damn heinous if you ask me), it's the game itself.

The 'plots' you get given to build a city in are about half the size of the smallest map in Sim City 4. One forum I was reading at work earlier had people complaining that they simply didn't have room to build anything bigger than a small town. How long until the chargeable 'bigger maps' DLC is released, I wonder?
 
Oh, and you can't save your game locally and your random internet neighbours have the capacity to grief your city into dust.

It's an alarmingly badly thought out design for a game of this type, and another 'Colonial Marines' style triumph of hype and marketing.

[smilodon]

I'm going to link to this You Tube video rather than embed it as it is not even remotely work safe, the liberal use of the F word means headphones would be a very good idea as well.

Suitably warned here's a review from my favourite You Tuber Francis about Sim City. His concise and reasoned comments sum up the issues with this game nicely

http://youtu.be/H9VClRhU404