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SimCity 5: How Not To Design a Single Player Game
It seems that the requirement to be online and save games on a remote server even in single player mode is leading to a less than ideal launch for SimCity 5. choke writes "Players attempting to play EA/Maxis' new SimCity game are finding that their save games are tied to a particular server, are facing problems with disconnects, inability to track friends or search for specific coop games online and failures to load game, and wait times of 20 minutes per login attempt. The question is, why the online restriction? Does this possibly indicate future micro-transactions in game?"
And if you believe that, I have some oceanfront property near Denver to sell you.
SimCity 3000 was released 13 years ago. Care to guess how much desktop computing power has advanced since then? Here's a hint: A lot.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
My brother talked me in to pre-ordering the game, it's been awhile since I had played any of the sim city games and I enjoyed the 1hr beta using his account.
But wow what a clusterfuck yesterday's launch was. I was woken up around 2am by our infant and used that as an opportunity to d/l and install the game. Apparently it was a very wise decision. Once I got home from work around 5pm ET trying to get connect and stay connected was impossible. Three times I got a city started only to get booted after about 15 minutes and the game did not save any of my progress. After making and eating dinner my brother and I tried to start our own region. That took around 30 minutes before it finally worked and again we were kicked after about 20-25 minutes. I gave up at that point since the baby was fussy and my wife needed a break.
The N. American servers were filling up almost immediately after being brought online. It's almost as if EA thought only a third of their pre-orders would try playing on day 1. But a failed launch for EA is par for the course. Fool me once, shame on you... fool me again, shame on me.
The game itself was enjoyable during the beta... too bad the publisher is one of the worst companies on the planet.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
I've watched the demo videos, the new Sim city is not a single-player game. It may be (incorrectly) sold as a single-player game, and it follows many years of single-player games with the same name, but this revision is not single-player.
The root functionality in this version is that people divvy up chunks of a region and build. The different microcities interact, and together you build something big and cool. The drawback is, that is not what Sim City has ever been, and I think the developers are overestimating how much support that model will have.
Many of the good old games are still for sale (cheap), without all the modern BS connection requirements, broken first releases, DRM, etc.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
X Years? try now. Players are complaining that saved games won't load back.
The game has been deliberately broken in the name of DRM, without any thought of what the outcome would be. With no commitment from EA to remove this built-in self-destruct, anyone would be a fool to buy this game. In 18 months when the "water pumps that work" DLC and the "slightly larger map, so you can actually build a city" DLC fails to meet sales targets, EA will simply pull the plug and all those people who paid a premium price will find, what they had was a bug-ridden FaceBook game.
Blaming "high demand" for these problems is an outright lie. The servers were taking three hours for people to download and unlock the game and 30 minutes to connect! This was when only pre-order clients and press who'd stayed up until midnight were on-line - hardly the maximum player-base you'd expect, certainly nowhere near "high demand".
And why would they be needed anyway for a SINGLE PLAYER game? Because EA broke it.
Exactly... that was the same thing Blizzard said about Diablo 3, it needs to be always on for some server work when released on the PC; then came out on the Xbox and it's got an offline mode. Only thing they needed it for on the PC was for DRM and the auction house.
That doesn't work without a server authority, so that needs always-online to work.
Thats funny because my friends, myself, and many others had that same sort of feature in SimCity 4 without a central server. And ... guess what ... EA even had a way to do it through their servers without any such always on requirement.
Thinking they NEED to be connected for this just shows how you don't understand how this stuff works and as such are being taken advantage of.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Not true.
The multiplayer part only happens if you actively invite someone into your region. If you don't take that step, it's an entirely single player affair, with you controlling all of the areas inside the region yourself. As a result, there's quite a large number of people playing it as a strictly single player game, and the always on nonsense is nothing but a dependency that breaks the game with no benefit.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
I'm not defending EA out of hand, but Sim City 5 is not a single player game. It *could have been or arguably should be* (and there is a sandbox mode that is arguably this single player game people are talking about, that has cheats etc enabled) but it's been very overtly designed to be primarily played as one region between a group of 3 people.
Also, I havn't experienced any of the problems people have been talking about.
"Old man yells at systemd"
I played for the couple of hours I could, last night. Even if you control all the cities in a region yourself, there is still a global market that is being interacted with. When the server was having connection problems (but would still let you play), the oil that I was exporting would no longer export and sit in the stockpile until I was alerted it was full. This was affecting my overall economy, because as an oil town, a lot of my economy was dependent on that global export. The market prices are determined by overall supply/demand on the particular server you're connected to (each server being a sim globe as it were). As others have pointed out, this is of course something that didn't have to be multiplayer, but does add an additional interesting variable to the game. Here's a screenshot of the market graph.