Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Tabor Murn]

I got the game, and when it works it's pretty fun.  I lost a 5 hour chunk of my day when everything went right.

That said, my friends and I have to hop servers pretty much everyday because typically the one we used the day before is lagged out or full. This has really hampered our ability to do anything major.

[Bacchanalian]

EA should talk to CCP about being "Fearless", and how well pissing off your playerbase goes over.

Unfortunately for the consumers, EA is a big enough company with enough clueless people throwing money at them (see also; the Madden/FIFA/whatever-the-baseball-hockey-and-basketball-ones-are-called franchises that recycle the same game every year and charge $60 for it each time) that I don't imagine they'll give a shit if a couple thousand angry gamers wave torches and pitchforks.  EA giving out a free game will be enough for most of those, too, leaving the angry group a small cluster of outliers that can be written off as extremists and ignored.

[Uraniae]

I love the general "city building" games, and I've loved various actual Sim-games over the years.  With that said...a Sim City without an offline component sounds...terrible to me.  I suppose I'll be sticking with some of my trusty old city building games like Outpost, Caeser, Pharaoh, and most recently Anno 2070.  Oh, and of course my old copy of Sim City 2000.

[Vincent Pryce]

[spoiler][/spoiler]

[Khloe]

Sim City's release reminds me of the nightmare of Diablo III over ten months ago. Personally, it's not so much the always-on aspect of DRM that irks me, but the fact that no developer who tries to utilize it anticipates the server load correctly. Do they just assume because it's not an FPS that it'll be some kind of sleeper hit that sells 50,000 copies?

[Victoria Stecker]

It's more an issue of capital investement. The number of people trying to play the game right at launch is a lot higher than the number of people who will be playing after a month. They purchase servers based on the number of people they expect to have playing it consistently, because they don't think it's worth buying a ton of extra server capacity just to handle the high traffic they might have for the first week. All that extra server space will then go to waste.

Unfortunately, that strategy doesn't work as well these days because the poor publicity from the lack of server capacity might hurt more than cost of more servers. But it's what they've done anyways.

The other issue is that with digital sales, it's harder to predict/control how many people are going to purchase a game than with sales in retail stores. This isn't a new problem, but it's one they're clearly still struggling with. So when you combine they're reluctance to overspend on servers with potentially higher than expected sales, you get overwhelmed servers.

Which wouldn't be a problem if you hadn't made a retarded design decision to require people connect to your servers to play the game, even if they don't want to play with other people.

[Wanoah]

Single player games should be single player games that you can play offline. It's breathtaking that a publisher cannot grasp that blindingly obvious concept.

You would think it would be pretty hard to shit up one of your great franchises this badly, but credit where it's due: EA are the grandfuckingmasters of shitting all over anything good that anyone ever made for them.

All they had to do was to take Sim City 4 and make it look a bit more modern and they would have had guaranteed sales and good reviews to last them the next decade.

I was looking forward to a new Sim City too. It sounded interesting, and it's at least 5 years overdue. The alarm bells started ringing quite early on though, so I waited for the reviews before even contemplating buying. I am so glad that I did!

The weirdest thing for me is that there is obviously such a large untapped fanbase for a peaceful city sim. Why has no one stepped up and delivered some competition over the years? Cities XL was the closest thing, I suppose, but it wasn't much of a simulation. Tropico is good for a couple of games, but it doesn't offer much freedom and gets repetitive. Both are fairly shallow.

I'd quite like to see a game that sits somewhere between Civ and Sim City: you choose a site for your settlement and develop it through history. It'd be pretty cool to develop your Iron Age hill fort into a modern metropolis.

[Victoria Stecker]

I'd quite like to see a game that sits somewhere between Civ and Sim City: you choose a site for your settlement and develop it through history. It'd be pretty cool to develop your Iron Age hill fort into a modern metropolis.

That is an awesome idea.

It's a shame that EA's current business model seems to be:
Find beloved franchise with loyal fanbase
Acquire franchise
Produce terrible sequel
Make tons of money off people expecting decent game.

[Gottii]

EA should talk to CCP about being "Fearless", and how well pissing off your playerbase goes over.

Unfortunately for the consumers, EA is a big enough company with enough clueless people throwing money at them (see also; the Madden/FIFA/whatever-the-baseball-hockey-and-basketball-ones-are-called franchises that recycle the same game every year and charge $60 for it each time) that I don't imagine they'll give a shit if a couple thousand angry gamers wave torches and pitchforks.  EA giving out a free game will be enough for most of those, too, leaving the angry group a small cluster of outliers that can be written off as extremists and ignored.

Not really true.  EA's stock has taken a beating recently, down to about 30% of its high, and its CEO will be forced to resign on the 30th.

People that matter have noticed that EA is loathed in the gaming community.  Hopefully it leads to meaningful changes.

[orange]

What free game did people pick?  Any suggestions?

[Davlos]

Just to spite Maxis, Simcity4.

[BloodBird]

What free game did people pick?  Any suggestions?

Picked Dead Space 3. I had plans to buy it and it was the only interesting choice.

I don't regret it at all. Not quite a horror game like it's predecessors but it's an awesome survival game, and me and a friend really enjoyed the co-op campaign. Currently we play a new game+, using one of the different game-modes available and maximum difficulty to spice things up on run nr2.

If you like the Dead Space series and/or want a survival game you can play cooperatively this really is the choice for you.

I can hardly wait for DS4.

[Andreus Ixiris]

All they had to do was to take Sim City 4 and make it look a bit more modern and they would have had guaranteed sales and good reviews to last them the next decade.

This.

It legitimately fucking baffles me that at no point did anyone with the administrative clout to make it happen actually realise that this was basically all they needed to do. Remake everything in Simcity 4 and Rush Hour in a full 3D environment, slightly more sane comepnsation for buildings built on slopes, a few extra bells and whistles here and there - it'd have sold like opium hotcakes.

I just don't understand EA. They butcher these franchises in search of mass-market appeal when literally all they ever, ever need to do to make a ton of money is let them be themselves.

[Karmilla Strife]

I got battlefield 3, since I already had mass effect, sim city 4, and didn't like the first deadspace. I knew almost a dozen people playing simcity and all have given up. It's been a huge disappointment.

Battlefield is fun though. I would have gotten that when it came out, but my old computer couldn't run it.

[Lyn Farel]

All they had to do was to take Sim City 4 and make it look a bit more modern and they would have had guaranteed sales and good reviews to last them the next decade.

This.

It legitimately fucking baffles me that at no point did anyone with the administrative clout to make it happen actually realise that this was basically all they needed to do. Remake everything in Simcity 4 and Rush Hour in a full 3D environment, slightly more sane comepnsation for buildings built on slopes, a few extra bells and whistles here and there - it'd have sold like opium hotcakes.

I just don't understand EA. They butcher these franchises in search of mass-market appeal when literally all they ever, ever need to do to make a ton of money is let them be themselves.

And the game is fugly.... It really has no redeeming feature, does it ?