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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?"
Seems like every new EA release has similar issues. With hordes of bad amazon reviews because of it.
I miss the era simple gaming. Where myself and my buddies would have a LAN party. COD4 was a godsend when I was deployed.
From the Ars Technica story:
Hopefully EA will learn from the experience and buff up its servers ahead of the game's official European launch on Friday.
As nice as that would be, it's the wrong lesson. The lesson EA needs to learn here is the same one that every other video game publisher has to learn: don't build inherently single-player games with always-on requirements! There was no reason for this in SimCity.
Maybe the next SimCity will learn that lesson from this one. Maybe EA will release a patch that offers the option of offline play. We can hope ... but as it stands now, I wouldn't be surprised if this is the end of the SimCity series -- Maxis' version of Master of Orion III, if you will.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
Didn't someone just claim that EA were not scumbags?
Because this is again stuff a scumbag does.
In another X years, you will not even be able to save progress with this game. Why would anyone buy into that?
What a ridiculous question... We know that there are at least 3 obvious reasons for this:
1) To prevent you selling the game. I'm guessing that there is some unique key for the copy you bought tied to your online profile.
2) To make you have to upgrade when they shut off the servers for SimCity 5 when they launch SimCity 6. EA are known for this. Anyone tried play FIFA 2011 or The Sims 2 online recently...?
3) To try and stop piracy. Instead of just having to activate online, which could be bypassed by some enterprising cracker, now bits of the game need a connection to actually function. Makes the job of cracking it more difficult I guess.
And yes, there will be micro-transactions. Be prepared for the worst.
"Looks like a hurricane is headed for your city. Pay $5.99 now to save your citizens!"
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."
EA hasn't been a game maker for years. They're just another Hasbro now. Turning out cheap copycat toy after cheap copycat toy. The only difference is who's branding they put on the game. They want everyone to pay more and more regardless of how much they paid for the game up front and that is much more difficult offline. With an always on, always tied to your account, always able to verify, always able to control the save game so you can't possibly just hex edit yourself the extra ???? you need.
The reason EA games suck is not because they are more greedy than useful, the reason EA games suck is because they are hundreds of times more greedy than useful. Ubisoft is hardly any better, those they at least learned how retarded always on was and stopped.
Remember, always connected means you in no way own your game. When they turn off the servers, your game goes away and you don't get your money back, its just done. No one will play SimCity5 again after that point.
Won't effect me.
When I first heard about SC5 after seeing the fucktarded SimCities Socities, I thought KICK ASS! A new SimCity ... and then put it in the back of my mind until it was actually released so I don't nag myself about it until then ... then yesterday I read a review on arstechnica.com ... Always on, small play area, economy is entirely unpredictable and irrational in its turns from bust to boom to bust with no logical reason why, all sorts of further issues in the full article. All of the issues seemed to stem from the fact that force you to play and depend on other people.
NOT EVERYONE WANTS TO FUCKING PLAY GAMES WITH INTERNET MORONS OKAY?
I certainly don't. Sometimes, I do. Sometimes I will play with friends, in certain games, when my mood fits it. But any game that I'm going to sit down and dedicate hours of effort and planning to, I'm only going to play with about 3 select friends who will NEVER have the time to be online at the same time as me (kids tend to make schedules hard on you). The rest of the Internet is pretty fucking annoying to deal with in those games, I certainly don't want my game to have to deal with how that jack ass sells his commodities and prices which screw my plan or spews his environmental mess at me.
I ALREADY HAVE REAL LIFE, I DON'T WANT IT IN A GAME.
In a game I want to be in control. I don't want to be at some little 'Anonymous' asshole's whim.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Simcity 5 dumbed down the road and zoneing system way to much.
I want citys in cities in motion 2
Look, this is from someone who last night made his first city about 8 times and lost it all 8 times because of the server nonsense. I was pretty annoyed.
But if we're going to lambaste someone for doing the always-online thing, maybe we shouldn't just jump to conclusions, maybe you should, learn something about i it first? Or maybe you just want to be hip & cool like everyone else and be against always-online without using any actual critical thinking. If so, bravo.
One of the cornerstone features of the game this time around is the Region play aspect. This was introduced in Sim City 4, but they've taken it to a much more interesting place in this iteration. Basically, there are about a dozen regions you can choose to play on; first, you choose one. Each region has X 'city slots'. This doesn't necessarily mean # of players, but it obviously puts a cap on X players in that region. Nothing stops you from building all X cities yourself over time. The cities have a lot of interconnection, hooked up by highway, or rail, or whatever. You can specialize one city as a college town, make another the bedroom community, etc. And, of course, you can invite people into your game (if its private, otherwise they just find it) to fill out the other cities instead -- and cooperate, fight, whatever.
That doesn't work without a server authority, so that needs always-online to work. Otherwise you'd need one person to host, and never stop. So this is logical. Plus, you can still play it by yourself if you want.
The part you can argue for the always-online component is whether they should have let you play in a local region offline. That's a reasonable question. But they didn't just 'tack always-online' on as a form of DRM (though I'm sure they were happy to have it) -- its pretty clearly a foundation of the way they expect the majority of people to play. And I think they're right -- the *only* reason I'm playing the game is so I can play with my brother. If it was a purely single player game, I'd have passed.
Now if could just get that server mess sorted out, I think this would be a fun game. From what I've seen so far, the UI is easily the best SimCity has ever had. It was pure pleasure laying out zones & drawing roads, etc. And I like their module system for expanding the utilities & other buildings.
It's not fair to say this is "how not to design a single player game". That's insipid. They've taken a single player game and made an interesting multi-player game, that if you really want to you can play by yourself. That's not the same thing.
Wood Shavings!
- Godai
According to EA, hte reason for the always online requirement, is because the game truly is a client server model. Each client, runs 1 region at a time. it then sends data about what has occurred in that region to then be processed by the EA server's and then pushed to the other regions in that game. This occurs every three minutes. Welcome to cloud computing.
http://www.simcity.com/en_US/blog/article/The-Benefits-of-Live-Service
One of the other reasons for the always-on requirement is probably the fact that some computations are offloaded to EA-servers.
source
But also forcing it for save-games is a bit silly.
The always on connection is nothing more than DRM in disguise. If the pirates hadn't been so keen to rip every game they could get their grubby little hands on this sort of nonsense probably wouldn't have happened.
Yes I know, the truth hurts. But if you're a company thats spent 10s if not 100s of millions on developing a game you're no longer going to watch that investment go down the toilet via a DVD bit copier. They figure that since most gamers now have always on broadband the inconvenience is minimal. Except when they fuck up like this of course.
Piracy isn't the issue here, EA is making it this way so when they shut down the servers in 3-ish years you can't play the game and they can move you onto SimCity6. They already killed the "used game market" for PC games and now they are moving to the "software as a service" model so they can remove games you bought to entice you with a new one. I for one won't be renting games from them, I'll go back to playing SimCity 2000 or SimCity 4 instead.
Not-knowing-what-regressions-are-FAIL:
Origin didn't allow purchasers to pre-load SimCity before its official launch at 12:01am EST this morning, apparently because the development team was "working to polish the game until the very last second"
Hint: you don't "work to polish the game until the last second", you work to polish and then delay launch because you can't be sure of the quality until you've retested and had a solid set of builds passing your regression testing and product testing. Who can possibly think it is a good idea to still be changing software code seconds before the launch?
Server-capacity-FAIL:
Later, even after the problems were officially "resolved," EA warned that "due to server load it may take up to three hours for your game to unlock.
Invasive-DRM-where-you-make-legitimate-users-suffer-disproportionally-for-your-FAILures:
Some online reports indicate that even those with the disc-based retail version of the game were delayed in their installation by Origin server problems.
Got-it-wrong-before-and-still-managed-to-FAIL:
The issues bring to mind the infamous "Error 37" that prevented many Diablo III players from logging into the game in the days after its launch last year, though it's unclear how comparatively widespread SimCity's server issues are
It isn't surprising that EA treats their customers like shit, but it is still infuriating that they can get away with this.
The "We must use the cloud to provide you with all the mathification going on!" claim is also weakened by the oppressively narrow limits on city size.
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.
No, GP has it right, didn't you know that for every copy of SimCity 5 that is sold, EA provision and install an additional server into their cloud.
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.
Again, this pointless "every game pirated is a lost sale" arguments. I'd say that most kids who pirate the game would never have had the money to buy the game in the first place.
I'd bet that companies lose more money into trying to make their games secure than the total of potential lost sales.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
There is a better game idea on kick starter
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1584821767/civitas-plan-develop-and-manage-the-city-of-your-d
EA has gone to far this this I was thinking about getting simcity 5 but the beta was a real trun off for me. I want to get this and cites in motion 2
Pirates may have hastened the process, but even without them this would come eventually as a way for publishers to battle their other nemesis: Second-hand games. An effective DRM system can also be used to stop people from selling the games on cheap when they are done, which in turn means everyone pays retail rather than sensibly waiting a few months so they can buy that $60 for $10 in the used bin.
EA treats you gamers like shit all the time and you keep coming back game after game like an addict needing a fix. All this crying and bitching and I guarantee every single complainer here will be first in line for the next EA launch.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
There is no way I can believe that there is a single player game out there that requires more processing power than a single PC can deliver. That seems rather... expensive.
Could you imagine the programmer who approached his boss with THAT one?
Programmer: Yeah boss, turns out that we made the computational requirements of this engine so complex that it requires us to maintain extra servers to handle the calculations for each gamer. So, that's cool right?
Boss: So help me god, if you actually think my answer would be yes I may have to throw you out of the window.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
The limit of what you can do easily is not give them money. There are plenty more things you could be doing, depending on how much you really care:
1. Encourage others to not give them money.
2. Start a campaign to spread awareness about how their (and any other similar) games harm everyone.
3. Start a campaign to boycott any games similar to this. A nice fancy website listing these games would be a start.
4. Bring this up as a consumer rights issue, start a lobby.
If you get enough people wound up about something, you can get the backing and momentum to really have an effect. Unfortunately few people actually care enough to do more than complain on slashdot as they're downloading the thing they claim to hate so much. There is much that could be done, but few people willing to do it.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
Absolutely false. in fact the reason Maxis gave for why they can't increase city size is that people's computers aren't powerful enough to handle it on the low end. If cloud magic was doing all the math, why would that be a problem?
The actual simulation is running on your system, using your CPU. The severs are there to enforce some rules and make multiplayer work... and to act as DRM.
Oh, and totally break the game for no good reason right now. How is the game getting an undeserved bad rep when people have had their cities corrupted by the servers and become unplayable multiple times? "Load save games" is not some nifty addon. If your program can't do that, it's fucking broken.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
No, GP has it right, didn't you know that for every copy of SimCity 5 that is sold, EA provision and install an additional server into their cloud.
Is that where all those old Atom netbooks are going?
More Twoson than Cupertino
Note: I don't own the game, and likely won't.
That said, EA was pretty clear in that Sim City 5 is a multiplayer game that has the option of a private game with only 1 person, not a single player game with a multiplayer option.
Calling Sim City 5 single-player is like calling Tribes (letting my age slip) a single-player game because you could setup a private map with bots.
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
Every dumb ass that bought that EA shit stain deserved every second of their queue times. Lets see: Gutted map sizes with Regions 1/4 the size of Sim City 4 (+1 step backwards) plus actual cities smaller then Sim City 1 (+4 steps backwards) along with gutted gameplay (no underground utility design, no subways... +3 steps backwards) along with always online requirement and DRM (+10 steps backwards), pre-order nonsense (imagine paying up front at a restaurant for you food.... +2 steps backwards) in exchange for Curved Roads (-1 step backwards... wait, nm Sim City 4 had mods that added those +0 then) and no modding support (+10 steps backwards).
It's almost like EA was jealous that Monte Cristo made a shittier Sim City game then Societies (Cities XL) and wanted to 1-up Monte Cristo in the fucking horrible Sim Socialist genre so they made this "Sim City" which is more a Cities XL 2 then anything else. It's just missing that magical "No, the state has decreed that only Executives can purchase these homes. Be gone peasant and free market subscriber!"
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
It is further weakened by the existence of dwarf fortress, a game with larger maps with greater depth, a cellular automaton fluid dynamics engine, and the simulation of creatures down to the layers of their tissues, personality traits and their recent thoughts and memories.
Looks like another classic game is going to suffer the effects of Greed, and be made into a money-grubbing, online-only, don't-even-think-about-playing-it-offline-by-yourself game.
Surely, I am not the only one out here to want games that I can play when there is no access to WiFi or any form of internet. Decent, engaging, immersive, single-player game play that does not require an account online somewhere, or constant call-home-to-mommy-for-permission-to-play crap.
Maybe I just want to play something to keep myself entertained while in the "boonies" or out of touch with the world?
Perhaps I don't want anyone else constantly monitoring my feeble progress through their killer levels with my n00b skillz while others snicker at my attempts, or spawn-camp me to rage-quitting something I've spent en exorbitant amount of money on in the first place.
Sorry for the rant. I just can't seem to part with my hard-earned cash so that I can be someone else s' target-practice.
Am I truly that alone out here?
Clearly, they ARE doing some calculations offline. Probably to figure out if you're cheating. They're not doing math for you, they're checking your math.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Does this possibly indicate future microtransactions in game?
Yes.
I haven't seen this mentioned yet in the discussion above (maybe I missed it somewhere), but EA's CFO announced that all of its games would include microtransactions from now on.
Requiring an online tether would be a logical way to add or take away features in the future through microtransactions. Requiring your save file to be in the cloud would also prevent people from hacking around it. The launch problems won't stop this – EA will chalk it up to a server glitch, fix it and move on – because they see too much money sitting on the table. They watched the rise of Zynga, who made money on the most senseless games through addictive microtransactions, and said "we want a piece of that pie."
They simply failed to notice when my response to their CFO's announcement was: "20-year customer of EA to stop buying all future games." Not that I expected them to notice. It would take a lot more people than we have on Slashdot to wake them up, because for every person here who understands that microtransactions are a method for making you pay repeatedly for something you already bought, there are 10,000 average Joes out there who think microtransactions make the game better.
Everyone remembers what Maxis stated about that. It's just that we're not stupid to buy that absolutely bullshit line. Do you seriously believe that, rather than letting my i7-3700K CPU right here in front of me do all the crunching, they have some massive series of super-computers somewhere that are doing the massive cumulative processing for everyone? And just how much bandwidth do you figure that is consuming? It'd be an enormous constant stream.
The ONLY thing being offloaded to the cloud is the negotiations of state between the cities in your region, operated by different players. The only reason THAT whole portion exists is to poorly justify the online component, which needs to exist to facilitate the shitty DRM.
And, frankly, all of this would be acceptable to a lot of people if the game itself wasn't so poor. No procedurally generated lands. Very small cities (too small to be able to build a self-contained city -- you run out of space quickly and have to rely on other people's cities for services that you dont physically have room for on the playfield to build).
Hey, I *wish* my city would be corrupted!
Once I felt I finally had the hang of things after a few hours, I wanted to wipe my city and start over. I can find no way of doing this. I don't really think there is one. It doesn't matter, though, because in the meantime I've grown bored of it and chalked this down as an expensive disappointment.
buys the rights to all your old favorite games implements them poorly, making them virtually unplayable.
Never say never. Ah!! I did it again!
Cities in Motion 2 looks good!
I like that it has a good road system and I hope it get's some like the NAM mod for Simcity 4
Four years ago I got a copy of the original Bioshock for my PC. I had just moved into a new place and didn't have internet yet, so I decided to install this single-player game for entertainment until I had connectivity. Lo and behold I couldn't install the game, as it required a phone-home. I haven't purchased a computer game since. I've discovered hobby board gaming, which works great in the absence of power and internet connections. The new way of doing things in the world of video games can go eat it's own asshole.
That's the whole thing that devs just won't understand...
DRM does not hurt or hinder pirates at all... not one iota.
DRM only harms legit users, who pay for a game to only realize it doesn't work right, too sluggish, laggy and when they complain on the official forums they get their computer blamed as the problem and told to "upgrade your cpu / upgrade your video card / upgrade to a SSD / etc"
when in fact it's the DRM calling home every x minutes and causing a problem giving legit users subpar experience.
When Assassins Creed 1, 2 and 3 came out I actually bought 1 and 2, but I downloaded the crack to remove the DRM.
part 3 I had had enough of Ubisoft's bullshit hate against all legit pc users so I pirated 3, and the cracked version works better than the legit version, people on forums complaining of lag spikes or stutters in framerate.
after downloaded the AC3 crack that imitates the AC3 DRM server I got 0 stutters and run around 80-100+ fps with a EVGA GTX 670
I do support the indie games, and games that don't ship with DRM such as the X3 franchise, their X3 reunion started with DRM but they quickly submitted a patch that deleted all DRM and all subsequent X3 releases have shipped with zero DRM and promise the new X3 coming out soon won't have DRM also.
So games like that I will financially support as best as I can, and indie games like Minecraft/ Towns / etc.
Simcity 5 will be cracked easily and only legit users will be harmed due to drm server outages / latency / etc. While skidrow / reloaded drm cracks will just imitate the server like was done with anno 2070 or AC3 and pirates will win yet again...
only way to beat pirates is don't try and fight them, we'll support non drm games financially, but you start slapping DRM on dvd's/blurays/video games then yell yea I will be pirating